The roof we replaced twice: standing seam metal in Pass Christian

We first worked for this homeowner on gutters and trim at his previous house in Bay St. Louis. When he bought a new home in Pass Christian, the roof was an architectural shingle only four or five years old — and he was adamant that he wanted metal. Snap-lock standing seam, the panel we install most on the coast.

The install went the way most do: shingle off, deck dried in with a high-temperature ice-and-water membrane, trim on, panels run. Somewhere in the panels we started seeing imperfections we had not seen before. Every metal roof has a few; we kept going, expecting them to settle.

They did not. Four or five months after completion he called and said it was getting worse. He was right. In the right light the panels looked dented — wavy, like hail damage on a roof no hail had touched.

It was the metal. The coil the panels were formed from was defective, and it was showing across the roof. We took the problem to the supplier and got nowhere, so we stopped waiting on them: we ordered new coil from a different source, and we stopped buying from the first one.

• Every panel came off. The roof was replaced in full, top to bottom, with new metal.
• A window pane cracked by a piece of trim during the work was replaced.
• New gutters after the second roof was on, at his request.

It is the only time we have had to replace an entire roof we installed. We should have caught it on the first run, and we said so. What we could control was what happened next.

He posted before-and-after photos with his review. He has since had us back for gutters, and when he started looking at another house on the coast, we were the first call.