Roof leak. Three contractors, three diagnoses, three estimates. How do I know what to believe?

Get more consults until you get a consensus. That’s what I did.

Also I am having a very similar issue at my house currently. And, yes, there was disagreement between the first two consults, (rebuild chimney, reparge and reline, or remove?).

So I kept getting opinions until we reached agreement. Once three people said, ‘replace the furnace, remove the chimney, then reroof!’, I knew that was the right course of action!

(And then…another snow storm! Grrrr! So it’ll be a couple more weeks before this all gets done!)

Did the latter two guys say why the first one is wrong, or just say that he’s wrong and they’re right because they know better? Did you talk to the first guy and say others want to do more and ask why he thinks it’s only the flashing?

From what little experience I have with contractors, some want to do the bare minimum, some want to do the absolute maximum to ensure that there won’t be any problems in the foreseeable future, and some want to do somewhere in the middle. Doesn’t mean anyone is necessarily a cheat, it’s just different philosophies and different costs. That might be what you’ve run into here.

When you need extensive repairs it makes sense to do everything at once. A simple leak requires nothing but patching.

In a similar circumstance, I hired a handyman we often use, and paid him just to take a look and tell me what he thought. He’s very experienced and knew he wouldn’t be hired for whatever needed to be done, so he was unbiased.

A home inspector might be a good choice for this purpose as well. He would also likely have an unbiased, experienced eye for what needs to be done.

And I wanted to add a comment about ladders. If you get one, get a good one. It’s definitely worth getting the best if you need to go 2 stories up. And if you get a tall ladder, a great addition is a set of Ladder Levelers. They will ensure the ladder has solid footing even if the ground isn’t level (which it usually isn’t).

“Home inspectors” very often have no actual building experience at all. They may have taken a course, or bought a book, which taught them to go through a checklist of common inspection points.