Exterior cleaning in Ashley

The postwar bungalow roofs. Half the stock here went up between 1945 and 1982, with the peak in the late fifties and early sixties, so the common roof is plain or interlocking concrete tile with long hips and a lot of ridge for the size of the house.

At 41.8% bungalows that is a great deal of edge and very little height. Moss sits in the lap, holds water against the tile and washes down until the gutter outlet stops taking anything. We take it off dry, scrape by hand where it is thick, and treat the rest with a biocide so the spore is killed, not just knocked loose. The saving grace of a single storey roof is access: a reach pole does much of it from ground level, so there is often no tower on the quote at all. Pressure still never goes on concrete tile: it strips the cement face and leaves the tile more porous than we found it.

The old garage and outbuilding roofs. Ashley has a lot of them, and on property of this age the corrugated sheet on a detached garage, a workshop or a lean to is often cement sheet containing asbestos. That is the one surface where the right answer is to leave it alone. Never jet wash it, never scrape it and never let anyone brush it down: the force breaks the surface and puts fibres into the air and onto your garden. We will clear the gutter that runs off it and tell you plainly that the roof itself is not a cleaning job.

Sand and cement render, some of it pebbledash, painted masonry on porches and bay walls, and plain brickwork on the later infill all get a soft wash at low pressure through a wide nozzle, sometimes with no pressure at all. Force on old render finds the weak mortar first and opens it up. North and east elevations in Ashley carry the worst of the green, because they sit in the shade of mature planting.

Under the forest fringe the gutters take leaf litter as well as moss, and clearing them is best treated as a job of its own. Block paving on the later drives takes a genuine pressure wash and fresh kiln dried sand swept back into the joints, and black spot lichen on concrete slabs is a treatment job with patience, which we say before you pay for it.

Area tells you little here. What is growing, and how you get to it, decide the time. Reach. Low bungalow eaves put most gutters and walls within pole reach. A chalet's steep front slope and dormer, or a garage roof standing between you and the back wall, need a tower or a roof ladder, as the work at height rules require.

What is growing. Thick moss on the north slope of a concrete tile roof is scraped by hand. Green algae on render on the south west side responds to a soft wash and a biocide. Lichen is killed with a treatment and weathers off slowly.

The surface. Concrete tiles, painted render, pebbledash and block paving each take a different method and pressure. Pebbledash in particular loses stones under a pressure washer, and a painted render can lift if the pressure is too high, so both get a gentle wash and a treatment, never a blast.

Water and gutters. Run-off is kept out of drains that lead to watercourses, and clearing the gutters once the roof is done adds time on a long bungalow run.

Ask which surfaces are treated and which are only rinsed, and whether the gutters are cleared afterwards.

For exterior cleaning we cover Ashley and the rest of BH25, through New Milton, Bashley and Barton on Sea and out towards Hordle and Sway, 8.9 miles from Boscombe and under New Forest District Council. The owner, Thomas Hannen, comes to see the roof, walls and paving and prices the clean himself.

His company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, number 15471719. One verified customer's Checkatrade rating for us is 10 out of 10. The visit costs nothing, and you pay nothing for the written, itemised quote either. Before you book a visit in Ashley, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Ashley need no application at all. What decides whether a change to the outside of your house does is who the council is, whether a conservation area or a listing applies, and whether the place sits in a protected landscape.