Where it started
The ute, the ladder rack, and the phone that rang on weekends.
Stuart Ridge Roofing started in 2013 with one ute, a ladder rack and a phone that rang mostly on weekends. Before that Marcus spent six years tiling roofs on the new estates out at Deeragun and Burdell, twenty roofs a month for a project builder, and he never once went back to look at any of them. That is a fine way to learn how a roof goes on. It teaches you nothing about how a roof fails.
The teaching happened in early 2019. When the floods came through Townsville we spent nine weeks doing nothing but make-safe work, street after street through Idalia, Rasmussen and Hermit Park, and we opened up a lot of roofs in a short time. Almost none of them had a hole in them. What they had was pointing that had let go along the ridge, valleys packed with leaf litter from a wet December, flashing that had never been dressed properly into the wall, and downpipes too small for the water a Townsville roof actually sheds. The water was not coming through the roof. It was getting under it and travelling, sometimes three metres along a batten, before it found a ceiling joint to drip out of. That is why the wet patch is almost never underneath the problem, and why we do not quote a leak over the phone.
It is also why we set a hose on every repair before we pack up. If we cannot make it leak again, it is fixed. If we can, we are still on the roof.
We are based in Kirwan because that is where Marcus lives, and the name comes off the skyline. Mount Stuart sits behind the town, and ridge is what a roofer calls the line along the very top of a roof. There are five of us now. Wayne has been tiling roofs in this town since before some of our clients were born. Ishan does the metal work and the guttering. Bailey is in his third year and has already re-bedded more ridge capping than most tilers do in five. Renee runs quotes, scheduling and the insurance paperwork, which is a full job on its own between November and April.
We build to wind Region C, the cyclonic classification Townsville sits in, because that is the code and because it is the difference between a roof that stays where you put it and one that does not. It costs more in fixings and it takes longer. We would rather have that conversation once, in the quote, than after a February blow.
We are not the cheapest quote in Townsville. We are the one that arrives with photos of what we actually found, a fixed price, and a number you can ring in the wet season and get answered.