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.
Before anything else in Ferndown, work out 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 rather than to 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 the town 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 the local aspect is north, so a slope here 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 clearing is by vacuum or by hand, outlets rodded, joints checked, and the valleys between roof planes looked at, since those fill first and put water inside rather than over the front. 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
From your call to a written price
Every line is written out: what goes on each surface, how planting and drains are protected, access, and where the residue goes. The visit and the written quote are free, and Thomas Hannen does the pricing. Ferndown has no conservation area and no listed buildings, which is unusual on this patch. Cleaning would need no consent anyway, but here the step afterwards is free too: painting render, sealing paving or changing a finish is your decision, or your freeholder's, not the council's. Planning Portal guidance on external walls sets out where altering a wall stops being maintenance. What we do plan is the water, and we work to pollution prevention guidance, which matters more on a communal car park draining to one gully.
Cost
What decides the price of a clean
No rate per square metre, because the same square metre can be twenty minutes or two. A detached bungalow with a pole run right around it, a mid-terrace with a shared side path, and a three storey block with a walkway over the front are three different jobs before a hose is unrolled, and work at height rules settle whether a pole or a tower is right. On a block, notifying the residents is part of the time as well. If you are weighing two prices, find out which surfaces get a biocide and which get a rinse, and what happens to the water.
If there is a date
A viewing, a visit or a deadline
Phone rather than fill in the form. If it is a managing agent's inspection or a block coming up for sale, tell us the date first, because communal work has to be notified to residents before it can be booked and that is time nobody costs in. We are six miles away, so a look is easy. Anything outside Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm, we arrange.
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
A local firm you can check
Ferndown, West Parley, West Moors, Longham and the BH22 postcodes, which is barely twenty minutes from where we are based. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free.
Questions
Ferndown questions we get asked
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. What normally works 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?
Aspect. The local aspect at Ferndown is north, so the rear elevation on a lot of properties sits out of the sun and the soil beneath it is naturally 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 comes off the heath into our gutters here?
Grit, fine litter and the granules that wash off tiles as they age. Woodland and heath nearby keep a steady drip of small material into the gutters rather than delivering one big autumn fall, and it settles into a sludge that holds water the length of the run. On a wide single storey roof there is a great deal of gutter for that to happen in.
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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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.