Price of Shingle removal, two layers vs three

 
I got a bid to put in a new roof, and it included removal of 2 layers
of shingles.
They got to work, and it turns out there were three layers of
shingles. We got the bill, and they now want to charge us an extra
$1100 for the removal of the third layer (32 square additional tear
off at $35/square)

Is this normal? Is it really so much more work than 2 layers?

  Unless you multi-posted your question to alt.home.repair (which would be
bad because multi-posting is bad) I'm going to cross-post this to
alt.home.repair because the group you posted this to
(misc.consumers.house) gets very little traffic.

pontiusj wrote:
 

Was it your decision to not remove the original shingles when the job
was done the last time?


It's bad enough to shingle over the existing roof, but to do it twice is
absolutely nuts.

Based on a typical 3-bundle per square, and a weight of 80 lbs per
bundle, you've got a weight of about 2500 lbs per layer.

That means there is 5000 lbs of extra weight on your roof (more than a
full-size pickup truck).

I'd say that yes, if the roofers were going to remove your top layer and
what they though was the bottom layer as part of the original quote, and
now they want to charge you an extra $1000 to remove a third layer, then
that's not really out of line.

 
In fact I didn't even know that it was legal to have three layers of
shingle on a roof (I'm sure that it's not where I live, as I know that
my house had an aluminum roof put on over two layers of shingle by the
PO, which required special permission from the building inspector,) so
the assumption that there were only two is reasonable IMHO.

nate

 
It isn't legal, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. All you
need to do is, do it yourself, or get it done by a shady contractor on
the sly.

I did it on a small section of my roof just to get through the winter,
and the "roofing police" didn't say a word to me.

I was up front with the roofer and warned him about the third layer.
He said "no problem" and didn't charge me extra. Of course it was a
small section, only about two squares.

 The house is 60 years old, and this is the first time we've put a roof
on.
So the previous owners probably just kept piling on the shingles!
We're glad to have them off, but didn't know if the price was right.
Thanks for the feedback.