Roofing in Slaton
Slaton is old enough that the interesting part of a roof job is usually the deck, not the covering.
Slaton grew as a railroad town south east of Lubbock, and a good deal of its housing stock is genuinely old. That changes the arithmetic of a roof here in a way that does not apply in the newer towns out west.
In a subdivision built this century you can price a tear off with reasonable confidence, because you know roughly what is under the shingles: sheet decking of a known thickness, one layer, a predictable structure. In Slaton you often do not know until it is open.
Plank decking
Older houses here were commonly decked with boards rather than sheets, laid with gaps between them. It is a perfectly sound way to build a roof and plenty of it is still doing its job a century on.
It does behave differently. Modern shingles want continuous support, and a nail that lands in a gap between planks holds nothing. If the planks have cupped or split, or if the gaps are wide, the right answer is often to overlay the planks with new sheeting before the roof goes on, which is real money and needs to be in the conversation before a number is agreed, not after the roof is open.
Layers
The other Slaton surprise is finding two or three roofs stacked up. Overlaying was standard practice for a long time, and a house that has been reroofed twice without a tear off has a lot of weight on it and a deck nobody has seen since the 1970s.
Tearing off three layers is more labour and considerably more disposal than tearing off one, and a bid that assumed one layer will not survive contact with three. Anyone quoting an older Slaton house should be saying out loud what they are assuming about layers and what happens to the price if they are wrong.
Masonry and flashing
There is more brick and more chimney here than in the newer towns, and every chimney is a flashing job. What you want to see is step flashing running under the shingle courses with counter flashing let into the mortar joints. What you often find on an older house is a previous repair made with a thick rope of roofing cement, which was watertight for a couple of years and is now a crack.
That detail is worth more attention than the shingle choice. A well flashed cheap roof outlasts a badly flashed expensive one every time.
Practical
Ask for a per sheet decking price and a per layer tear off price in writing before work starts. On an older Slaton house those two lines are where the final number is actually decided.