Ask Each Roofer About the Yard Sign on Your Lawn

A roofing crew arrives with a dumpster, a trailer and often a truck with the company name painted on the door. Some roofers also want a yard sign on your lawn for the length of the job. Most homeowners never think to ask until the stake is already in the grass. In St. Louis the sign question is a small line on a long bid, but the answer tells you how each roofer thinks about your property while the work is underway.

Why a sign shows up at all

Roofers put signs out to announce a job on the street, to catch referrals from neighbors who see the work, and sometimes to mark where materials will be staged. Those are ordinary business reasons. The trouble starts when a sign sits in the path of the dumpster drop, next to a sprinkler head, or over a buried line that nobody located. A stake goes into the ground, and the ground here is often heavy clay. After a wet April, that clay holds water, so a stake can loosen the turf and leave a soft spot that shows up after the first hard rain.

Missouri's 811 locate service exists for exactly this kind of ground work. If a roofer's crew sets a stake, a post or a staging frame in the yard, ask whether the locate call has been made. A sign is a small job, but a roofer who skips the locate for a sign is showing you how the crew treats the ground under the job.

What a bid should say about the sign

A roofing bid does not need a long paragraph about signage. It needs one line that answers three things: whether a sign goes out, where it sits, and when it comes down. If the bid is silent, the answer is not settled, and you will be settling it on the morning the crew arrives.

Keep the answer in the same written scope that covers shingles, tear-off and cleanup. A verbal promise that the sign will be removed the same afternoon the job finishes is hard to hold anyone to after a long week of rain. A line in the scope gives you something to point to when the sign is still in the yard on Monday.

Questions to put to each roofer

Send the same short list to every company on your comparison sheet. Identical questions make the answers easy to line up side by side.

• Will a yard sign go on my lawn, and if so, exactly where?
• Who calls for the buried-line locate before any stake or post goes into the ground?
• Who removes the sign, and on what day after the final walkthrough?
• Does the truck or trailer carry a logo, and will it park on the street or on the lawn?
• If the stake, the trailer or a foot leaves a mark on the turf, who repairs it, and by when?
• Will the sign or the truck be used in any photo or advertising that you have not approved?

The last question matters more than it looks. Some roofers use job photos in their own marketing. Your house, your lawn and your street can end up on a website if the bid does not say otherwise. Ask now, while you still have leverage over the bid.

How to read the answers

A roofer who answers each question in a sentence and puts the answer in writing is describing a process you can check on the day the crew arrives. A roofer who calls the sign standard, without saying where it goes or who takes it down, has not thought about your yard in particular. Neither answer is a verdict on the shingles, but the second one tells you how much follow-up the job will need.

Pay attention to where the answer lands. An answer on the bid itself is easier to enforce than an answer given on the phone. If a roofer will not put the sign rule in writing, treat that as information about the rest of the scope too.

What to do if you are comparing Keys Roofing

Keys Roofing can answer the same questions for your property. Ask them, get the answer in the written scope, and compare it with the other bids on the same page. Keys documents the job with photos and measurements and gives you that written scope to keep. The office number is (314) 220-2333, and a call there is a fine way to get the sign question on the record before anyone sets a stake.

Whatever roofer you choose, the sign is a decision about your yard, and it should be made by you on paper before the crew arrives. Sorting it out after the stake is in the ground costs more, both in turf and in patience, than sorting it out at the kitchen table with the bids spread in front of you.