Roofing Contractor in Louisville, KY
A roof is the cheapest part of your house to maintain and the most expensive thing to ignore. By the time a ceiling stain shows up, water has usually been in the decking for a season or more.
Nest Construction is a licensed and insured general contractor in Louisville. Gil has run crews here since 2015 and we’ve closed out more than 255 projects across Jefferson County and Southern Indiana. We do full roof replacement, repairs, decking, and ventilation. Built Right. Built To Last.
Repair or replace
Not every roof needs replacing. What we look at:
Age. A 3-tab asphalt roof is designed for 15–20 years in this climate. Architectural shingles run 25–30. Past 20 and losing granules, repairs stop making financial sense — you’re paying setup and labor twice.
Where it’s failing. A leak at one chimney, one pipe boot or one valley is a repair. Boots crack and fail long before shingles do, and a boot replacement is a few hundred dollars. Failure across multiple slopes is a replacement.
What the shingles look like. Cupping, curling, bald patches and granules in your gutters are the roof telling you it’s at the end. Brittle shingles can’t be walked on for a repair without breaking more of them.
How many layers are up there. A second layer over an existing roof saves the tear-off cost. It also traps heat, shortens the new roof’s life, hides rotten decking and makes the eventual tear-off more expensive. We don’t recommend it, and we won’t quote a third layer.
We’ll tell you when a repair is the right answer. We’d rather do the $600 job now and the roof in four years.
Storm and hail damage, and how claims work in Kentucky
Louisville sits in the Ohio Valley and gets straight-line wind, hail and the occasional tornado warning. Wind lifts and creases shingles; hail bruises the mat under the granules. Neither always leaks right away, which is why storm damage often gets found months later.
Here is the process, described plainly. We are contractors — not a public adjuster, not your insurance agent — and nothing here is advice about your policy.
- Most Kentucky homeowners policies cover sudden wind and hail damage and exclude wear, age-related deterioration and deferred maintenance. Which side a given roof falls on is your carrier’s determination.
- Policies pay on one of two bases. Actual Cash Value pays the depreciated value of the roof; Replacement Cost Value pays the cost to replace it. Which applies is written in your policy, and some carriers move older roofs to an ACV schedule at 15 or 20 years.
- You report the loss to your carrier. Under Kentucky’s unfair claims settlement regulation, 806 KAR 12:095, the insurer must acknowledge the claim within 15 days, reply to pertinent communications within 15 days, and offer any payment due within 30 calendar days of receiving proof of loss. If the investigation isn’t complete, it must send a status letter every 45 days.
- Your policy may contain a contractual limitation period — a deadline to file suit that can be shorter than Kentucky’s general statute of limitations. It’s in the policy document.
- The carrier sends an adjuster. We’re glad to be on the roof at the same time. We provide a written, itemized scope and price for the work. The coverage decision is between you and your carrier.
We price the roof the same whether you’re paying out of pocket or through a claim.
Shingles: 3-tab vs architectural
3-tab is a flat, single-layer shingle with cutouts. Cheapest asphalt roof, typically rated to 60 mph wind, mostly used now on rentals, outbuildings, and jobs where the budget won’t stretch.
Architectural (dimensional/laminate) shingles are two layers laminated together. Heavier, rated to 110–130 mph depending on the product, 25–30 years instead of 15–20, and they hide an uneven deck better. The difference is roughly $1.50–$3.00 per square foot installed — a few thousand dollars on a typical Louisville house for ten more years of roof.
Class 4 impact-resistant shingles are rated against hail. They cost more and some carriers offer a premium credit for them; ask your agent whether yours does.
We install architectural on nearly every job. When someone asks for 3-tab, we quote both so the difference is visible in dollars.
Decking and ventilation — the two line items that move
Decking. Nobody knows what’s under your shingles until the tear-off. Soft or delaminated sheathing gets replaced at roughly $75–$100 per sheet installed in this market. On a 1950s Louisville house with plank decking rather than plywood, expect more of it. Any honest estimate has a per-sheet decking allowance in writing. A bid with no decking line is a bid that’s going to change.
Ventilation. The most commonly botched part of a roof. An attic needs balanced airflow — intake low at the soffits, exhaust high at the ridge — roughly one square foot of net free vent area per 300 square feet of attic floor with a vapor retarder and balanced intake, 1:150 otherwise. Get it wrong and you cook the shingles from underneath, void the manufacturer’s warranty, and grow mold on the sheathing in winter. We check that the soffit vents aren’t packed with insulation, a very common find in Louisville attics, before we set the ridge vent.
Worth doing at the same time: pipe boots, step and counter flashing at chimneys and walls, valley metal, drip edge, and ice-and-water membrane at eaves and valleys.
What a Louisville roof costs in 2026
2026 installed pricing in Louisville: 3-tab $4.50–$6.00 per square foot, architectural $6.00–$9.00, Class 4 impact-resistant $8.00–$12.00, metal $12.00–$18.00+. Tearing off multiple existing layers adds $0.50–$1.50 per square foot.
By house size, for architectural shingles:
| Home size | Roof area (approx.) | 2026 installed |
|---|---|---|
| 1,200 – 1,600 sq ft | 14 – 20 squares | $8,500 – $12,500 |
| 1,600 – 2,200 sq ft | 18 – 27 squares | $10,500 – $16,000 |
| 2,200 – 3,000+ sq ft | 24 – 38 squares | $13,500 – $22,000+ |
One thing to understand: roof area is not house square footage. A steep roof on a 1,600 square foot house can have 2,400 square feet of surface. Pitch drives labor too — anything over 8/12 needs staging and slows the crew down. The Highlands and Old Louisville are full of steep, cut-up roofs with dormers and valleys, and those price higher per square than a simple ranch gable in Fern Creek.
Get a real number
Call or text Gil at (502) 821-9118 or email Office@nestconstructionky.com. We’ll get on the roof, photograph what we find, and give you a written scope and a fixed price with the decking allowance spelled out. Free on-site estimate, reply within 24–48 hours. Contact us here.
Serving Louisville and Jefferson County — St. Matthews, Jeffersontown, Prospect, Middletown, Anchorage, Lyndon — plus New Albany, Jeffersonville and Clarksville, Indiana.
Questions we get about roofing
How long does a roof replacement take?
Most Louisville houses are one to two days on site. Steep, cut-up roofs with a lot of valleys and dormers run three. We tear off only what we can dry in the same day, so your house isn’t open overnight.
Do I need a permit to replace a roof in Louisville?
Re-roofing a one- or two-family home generally doesn’t require a Louisville Metro building permit when you’re not changing structure. Structural repairs to rafters or trusses do. In a local preservation district — Old Louisville, Cherokee Triangle, Butchertown, Clifton and the others — changing roofing material or appearance can require a Certificate of Appropriateness. We’ll tell you which applies.
Can you just replace the damaged section?
Sometimes, and we do it. The honest caveat is that new shingles never match weathered ones exactly, and a partial replacement on a street-facing slope will be visible. On a back slope nobody sees, a section repair is often the smart money.
Will you tell me if I don’t need a new roof?
Yes. Roughly a third of the roofs we’re called out to look at need a repair, not a replacement. We’ll show you photos of what we found either way.
Do you handle gutters and siding too?
Yes. Gutters, soffit, fascia and siding are the same job as the roof edge, and doing them together means one setup and one crew. Drip edge, gutter apron and fascia have to work as a system, or water gets behind the gutter and rots the fascia.