Exterior cleaning in Ferndown
Roof cleaning, render and masonry soft washing, gutters cleared and paving brought back across Ferndown. Priced surface by surface, for owners, freeholders and agents alike.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Last updated
Exterior cleaning in Ferndown starts with who is allowed to order the job. Roughly three homes in ten here are flats or maisonettes, and the roof, the walls and the communal paving belong to the freeholder, not whoever lives behind the front door. If that is you, the call takes a different shape, and we will say so on the phone rather than after we have priced it.
For everyone else it is the usual list. The roof has gone green across a whole slope. The render is streaked under the windows and patchy on the shaded side. The block paving has weed in the joints and turns slippery every autumn. Or the gutters have been quietly filling with pine needles for years and are now overflowing onto the drive.
We come out, survey each surface, and tell you which will come up with a wash, which need treating and then time to work, and which are not worth spending on. The site visit is free. The written price puts every surface on its own line, so you can do the drive now and the roof later, or hand the whole thing to a committee to look at.
The work
What Ferndown actually asks us to clean
Bungalow roofs, in quantity. 42.7% of homes in Ferndown are single storey, which means a great deal of shallow-pitched concrete interlocking tile laid from the late 1960s onward.
Tile of that age is porous and holds moss deeply, the low pitch gives water less help to run off, and a slope that faces away from the sun can go most of the year without properly drying. The growth is scraped off dry, the tile soft washed at low pressure, then treated so the spores that stay in the surface do not bring the regrowth back the next winter. Nothing is forced up under the lap. Most of it is done from the ground with a pole, so the access line on the quote is small and the ridge and verges get inspected while we are at it.
Low-rise blocks, and the parts nobody owns individually. Nearly a third of Ferndown is flats, mostly two and three storey with painted render, tile-hung or brickwork panels and open walkways. The work is the communal fabric: entrance canopies, stairwells and walkway soffits, balcony undersides, the render streaking below every sill, bin stores, and the block paved parking court that gets a green film across the bays nobody parks on. It is scheduled around residents, not against them, so bays are cleared in sections and nothing wet is left across a route people use at night.
Soft washing takes black spot lichen and algae out of painted render without stripping the paint, and cleans brickwork without opening a mortar joint. Fascia, soffit and gutter faces get washed by hand at the same time, because a clean roof above a green fascia looks half finished from the pavement. Ferndown sits in pine country and the needles pack into a mat that no rain shifts, so gutter clearing is worth pairing with the wash. Block paving is re-sanded after washing. Everything sprayed is a biocide sold for the surface and used to its label, as the biocides regime the HSE administers requires of anyone applying one.
How it runs
Soft washing roofs, render and drives, planned ahead
Thomas prices the cleaning in person, and neither the visit nor the written quote costs anything. He goes surface by surface and decides what each needs: a biocide for the roof tiles, a soft wash for the render, a pressure clean for the drive. The quote lists the treatment for each surface, how planting and drains are protected, access, and where the residue goes.
Bungalows are cleaned from the ground with a pole, or from a tower. Roof moss is scraped off by hand, never blasted, which spares the tiles, and the gutters are emptied afterwards. At a block of flats, residents are warned beforehand, cars may have to move, and because a shared car park often drains to one gully, the run-off is controlled. Moss and debris are bagged for the van. A cracked tile or a loose patch of render spotted on the way is photographed and priced as a separate job.
No conservation area covers the town, though there are listed buildings, Holy Cross Abbey at Stapehill among them. Cleaning needs no consent on an ordinary house, and painting render, sealing paving or changing a finish afterwards is your decision, or your freeholder's, unless the building is listed. The Planning Portal's page on external walls explains where altering a wall stops being maintenance. We work to pollution prevention guidance on where the water goes.
Cost
Surfaces, height and residents: what a clean costs
Cleaning is not charged per square metre. The same patch can be quick or slow depending on what has grown on it, how old the growth is, and how you reach it.
Material. Concrete roof tiles, render, block paving and flat roof membrane each call for a different method and pressure. Render and membrane get a soft wash and a biocide; too much pressure harms them.
Height. A detached bungalow you can walk round with a pole is quick. A terrace with a shared side path, or a three storey block with a walkway at the front, takes more setting up, and the work at height rules decide whether a tower goes up.
Growth. Trees close to a roof keep it shaded and damp, so the moss grows thicker and takes longer. A biocide carries on working for weeks, and the rules on using it sit in the biocides regime the HSE administers.
Blocks. Notifying residents, moving cars and managing run-off in a shared car park all add time.
If you are weighing up prices, ask which surfaces get a biocide and which just a rinse, whether a follow-up visit is included, and where the water ends up.
If there is a date
A date to meet, such as an inspection or a sale
Phone us and give us the date first. For a managing agent's inspection or a block going on the market, residents have to be notified before communal work is booked, so allow for that. A roof treated with biocide takes weeks to finish working, while render and paving brighten up at once.
We walk round each surface on the first visit and tell you what can be done by your date. A slippery path or step is worth treating now. Cleaning is booked for weekdays, 8am to 6pm, and we return missed calls as soon as we can manage.
One local thing
Who is actually allowed to order the work
A large share of Ferndown lives in flats and maisonettes, and the outside of a flat is almost never the leaseholder's to deal with. The roof, the render, the gutters, the walkways and the parking court are usually retained by the freeholder and maintained through the service charge, which is why a resident can be looking at a green roof for three years while everybody assumes somebody else has it in hand.
If you are a leaseholder, the useful move is not to book a clean. It is to get a written quote you can put in front of the freeholder or the managing agent, with each block and each surface itemised so it can be costed against the reserve fund. We will price it that way for you and it still costs nothing.
There is a second thing worth knowing before anybody signs. Where the cost to any one leaseholder passes a set threshold, the freeholder has to consult before spending it, under section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985.
That consultation takes weeks, so a clean that everybody agrees on in spring can easily not happen until high summer. It is not an obstacle, it is a timetable, and the way to work with it is to get the quote early and in writing. For freeholders and agents we are happy to price a block, a phase or an estate the same way, surface by surface, so the parts that matter can be done first and the rest scheduled when the money is there.
Who you are dealing with
Exterior cleaning from a firm you can look up
We clean roofs, render and drives in Ferndown, West Parley, West Moors, Longham and the BH22 postcodes. Ferndown is 5.9 miles from where our base sits in Boscombe, in the Dorset Council area.
The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, with the company number 15471719. Thomas Hannen, the owner, looks at every surface and prices the clean himself. Checkatrade carries a verified customer's 10 out of 10 for us. Looking costs you nothing, and neither does the itemised written quote. Before you book a visit in Ferndown, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Ferndown?
Most repairs in Ferndown 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.
| Question | In Ferndown |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Ferndown. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Ferndown, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, Ferndown has listed buildings. If yours is one, or stands in the grounds of one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Ferndown. |
Questions
Questions about exterior cleaning in Ferndown
I own a flat in Ferndown. Can I book this myself?
For the inside, yes. For the outside, usually not. 30.9% of Ferndown dwellings are flats, and everything past the front door of one, roof and walls and bin store and shared paths, belongs to the freeholder and is funded through the service charge. The simplest route is that a resident gets us out for a quote and passes it to the managing agent, and we deal with them from there.
Why does the back of the house never dry out?
Shade: if the rear elevation of your house faces away from the sun, it sits in shadow for much of the day and the soil beneath it stays wet, and a wall that never gets a few hours of drying carries a film the whole year. It is why the same treatment holds up well on one side of a house and looks tired on the other within months.
What does the heath do to our walls and paving?
It keeps them damp. Woodland and heath close to Ferndown hold moisture in the air and drop a steady drip of grit and fine litter all year, and that settles on paths and in the corners of a patio where algae roots into it. A treatment after the wash slows the green down. The same litter sludges up the gutters, which want clearing on their own routine.
Where does the moss go once it is off the roof?
Into a bag and onto the van. It comes away in mats, drops into the gutters and over the edge into whatever is underneath, so we clear the gutters a second time at the end rather than leaving them packed. Soil at Ferndown is naturally wet, so a heap left on a border just sits there and kills the planting below it. Nothing goes down a drain.
Is there a charge for coming out to look?
There is not, and there is none for the written quote either. Thomas Hannen owns the firm and does the pricing himself, so the person who looks at the roof is the person you deal with afterwards. With 42.7% of Ferndown being bungalows, he can see most of a roof from the garden, which makes a realistic quote possible without anyone having to climb onto it.
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Exterior cleaning near Ferndown
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Free quote
Get a price you can put in front of anyone
A free site visit in Ferndown, then a written itemised quote with every surface on its own line. Tell us if there is a date or a meeting to work to.