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Three invoices for tiles, ridges, and a coating mean three handovers and a gap where nobody owns the leak. One team writes one scope and finishes the system in order. Roof Revival Melbourne would rather carry that list than arrive as the third trade on a roof the first two have already defined badly. The gap between trades is where Melbourne restores unravel.
A roof system is an order. Failed bedding comes off, broken units are swapped, the face is prepared, the coating goes on last. When three businesses own three of those steps, each one optimises the step. The tiler does not want to wait. The pointer wants a dry week that the tiler already used. The coater arrives to a ridge that is “done” in someone else’s photo and coats it because the booking is today. The leak lives in the handover none of them signed.
One team can still make a mistake. The mistake has a name on it. You are not hosting a small claims triangle about whose dust was left in the bed.
The ridge crew re-beds and leaves the hips proud of the tiles the tile crew have not yet swapped. The tile crew then walks the new bed. The coating crew masks nothing and sprays the fresh pointing, so the “finished” ridge is a different colour from the sample and brittle at the edge. Everybody did their trade. Nobody did the roof. You will hear three versions of this at the final payment, all sincere.
Valleys are the classic orphan. The tiler says the iron is the roofer’s. The coater says they do not touch metal. The person who sold you the restore from a call centre has already been paid for an introduction. The valley stays rusty in the middle of a new colour, and the ceiling stain, which was the valley all along, returns on cue. A single scope puts the valley on the list or takes it off honestly. It does not leave it between companies.
The single scope we are defending is roof restoration in Melbourne. Repairs and replacements have the same logic at smaller and larger sizes. One contract, one sequence, one handover.
Each quote looks keen because each quote is incomplete. The pointer’s number does not include tiles. The coater’s number assumes prep someone else will do, then charges a call-back when the someone else left lichen. Add the three invoices, the three call-outs, and the week your house is a site for strangers who do not share a program, and the single quote stops looking heavy. It includes the coordination you were going to do yourself from the kitchen table.
There is a version of split trades that works: a head contractor who employs them, holds the scope, and does not make you the coordinator. That is still one team from your side of the contract. The failure mode is you as the head contractor, with three mobile numbers and no experience of which trade has to win the argument about dryness, cure time, and weather. You will be asked to referee. The referee usually pays both sides.
Coatings have weather and cure needs. Bedding has weather needs. Tile swaps have to happen before the bed is the finished surface, or the new tiles sit proud of a ridge that was pointed too early. A crew that does all three can wait a day without sending an invoice for “stood down by the other company”. A crew that does one will invoice the stand-down and mean it, because you booked them into a collision.
Access is shared or it is paid three times. Scaffold for the pointer, a second delivery for the tiler, a third for the coating on a two-storey Doncaster hip. The two-storey access note is about that cost inside one job. Multiply it by three bookings and the nature strip becomes a calendar.
Defects land cleanly only when one party did the work. A crack in new pointing on a roof coated by someone else is a sport. On one contract it is a return visit. Keep the sport out of the roof.
Some owners already have a relationship with one trade. Fine. Then appoint one of them, in writing, as the party who accepts the roof at the end. Give that party the scope and the right to refuse the next trade’s start if the previous step is wrong. If nobody will accept that role, you have learned that the split is three ways of not owning the leak. Come back to one quote.
Roof Revival Melbourne will take the list. We will not be the coating visit on a bed we did not see installed, unless the inspection shows that bed is sound and the coating is genuinely all you need. In that case the other trades are not required, which is a nicer split: zero, plus us.
Melbourne will hand the job a wet day in the middle. A single team can stop before a coating and come back without three companies rebooking each other. Split trades turn that wet day into a chain of “we were ready and they weren’t”. You pay for the chain in delay even when nobody adds a fee. Ask, before you sign with three names, who decides that Tuesday is too wet to point and what the other two do with their bookings. If the answer is that you will ring them, you have found the gap.
Send suburb, storeys and two roof photos. Roof Revival Melbourne — 0426 516 883 · info@roofrevivalmelbourne.com.au
