Why two estimates for the same roof look nothing alike
Two people can climb the same roof and hand you numbers that do not resemble each other, and the gap is almost never one crew being greedy and the other being cheap. It comes down to what got written into the scope and what got mentioned out loud and never put on paper. A verbal promise about ice and water barrier does you no good once the crew that made it is three jobs away and cannot remember the conversation.
What the material list should actually name
A gutter line that just says gutter and downspouts tells you nothing about gauge or hanger type, and a roof line that just says shingles skips the drip edge and the underlayment underneath everything you can see once the job is finished. Ask for the actual product names and quantities, not a category.
On a Fargo roof or gutter job specifically, the two lines we tell homeowners to look for by name are the ice and water membrane coverage at the eaves and valleys, and the soffit venting that either gets replaced or gets reused as is. Both get promised out loud more often than they get written down.
Cleanup and protection worth writing down
A tear off puts old shingles, old gutter sections, and a surprising number of stray nails into your yard and flower beds. Ask what the crew does to protect landscaping before work starts and how debris and nails get cleared once the job is done, because a magnet sweep of the driveway takes minutes and catches almost everything a quick look misses.
Questions worth asking before anything gets signed
Ask whether the person who inspected the roof and wrote the scope is the same person supervising the crew that shows up to do the work. Details from the original inspection do not always make the trip when the job gets handed off.
Ask what happens if the crew opens up the roof or pulls the fascia and finds something the estimate did not account for. A contractor with a clear answer, stop, show you what was found, talk through it, has probably handled it before.
Reading the repair versus replace option honestly
When a repair and a replacement are both genuinely on the table, they should appear as two separate options with their own scope, not folded together so the smaller number looks artificially cheaper. None of this is about finding the lowest number. It is about comparing two pieces of paper that actually describe the same job, instead of guessing at what each contractor meant by the words they left out.