Exterior cleaning in Furzehill
Roof moss, green render, blocked gutters and slippery paving across Furzehill and BH21. We look at the whole outside and put a written price in front of you.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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Exterior cleaning in Furzehill is mostly dealing with things that are alive: moss on the north slope, algae on the render, a green film on the paving. It comes off with a soft wash, the right treatment and patience, not with pressure, and a firm that reaches for a lance first will cost you a surface.
Houses in Furzehill tend to show their need for a clean on the roof first. The roof has gone green on one side and the moss is starting to drop into the gutter. The gutters have stopped coping and water is running down the wall by the front door. Or the drive and the patio have turned slippery underfoot and nobody fancies the walk to the bins in the wet.
We come and look at all of it, not just the bit you rang about, because the same visit that cleans a roof is the visit that should clear the valley and check the downpipe runs. You get a written price for what needs doing and an honest word about what does not.
The work
What needs cleaning on Furzehill roofs and walls
Roof cleaning, mostly on concrete tile. Nearly half the houses out in Furzehill went up between the war and the early eighties, and what came with them was concrete interlocking tile.
It holds moss better than anything else on a roof: the face is slightly open, a north slope never really dries, and the moss roots into the surface rather than sitting on it. A roof clean is a dry scrape to take the bulk off, then clearing what has washed down into the laps and the valley, then a biocide treatment that keeps working for weeks after we have gone. A lance on those tiles strips the cement face off, exposes the aggregate underneath, and the regrowth comes back faster because the surface is rougher than it was.
A quarter of the housing in Furzehill is single storey, and a bungalow has one long gutter run with a hedge or a field tree leaning over most of it, so check it is running before you pay for a wall clean. A wet wall is more often a gutter joint or a blocked outlet than anything wrong with the roof.
The seventies stock is mostly pebbledash or painted render, and it marks either with black spot algae in hard little dots on the sunnier walls or with a green wash of algae and lichen on the north and east elevations, worst in the first foot or so where rain splashes back off the ground. That is a soft wash at low pressure with a treatment doing the work. Pebbledash and a jet wash is the most expensive mistake on this list, because the stones come off with the dirt and there is no putting them back.
Drives and paths here are block paving, concrete slabs and tarmac. Block paving gets a wash and then a re-sand with kiln dried sand, because sweeping the joints out and leaving them empty is how the blocks start to move. Slabs and tarmac want a wider fan nozzle and less force than most people expect.
Old brick, where we say no to pressure. There are listed farmhouses and cottages around Furzehill, Wilksworth Farmhouse among them, and older brickwork in the garden walls and outbuildings besides. Soft handmade brick and lime mortar cannot take a pressure wash. It takes the face off the brick and the mortar straight out of the joint, and the wall then holds more water than it did before.
How it runs
Soft washing a roof, render or drive, surface by surface
Thomas comes out, looks at every surface, what is growing on it and where the run off will go, and prices it himself. He lists, for each surface, how it will be cleaned, what gets covered up, how we reach it, and where the dirty water and residue will go. All of it sits on one written quote.
Furzehill's seventies concrete tiles collect moss, render greens on the shaded side, and block paving drives gather weeds and algae. Roofs are cleaned by hand and brush, never blasted, and a biocide goes on afterwards to kill the roots, used within the biocides regime the HSE administers. Render gets a low pressure soft wash, and paving a pressure clean and re-sanding. Plants, windows and doors are covered first. If a cracked tile or blown render turns up, you get a picture and a price before anything else.
Cleaning is maintenance and needs nobody's permission. Painting, sealing or re-coating a wall is a different question on a listed building, and there are listed entries in and around Furzehill, so that can need listed building consent from Dorset Council before the look of it changes. We will say so before we quote, not after.
Cost
Moss, algae and reach: what sets the price of a clean
We do not price a clean per square metre, because moss an inch thick and a light film of algae on the same area are very different jobs.
How high it is. A bungalow roof and its gutters can usually be done from a reach pole on the ground. A two storey detached house needs a longer pole or a tower, and an outbuilding at the end of a track means carrying everything down to it. Which of those is safe comes from the work at height rules, and it goes on the quote.
The surface. Concrete roof tiles, render, block paving and timber decking each need their own method and their own treatment.
Run off. On slow-draining ground the wash water needs somewhere to go that is not a neighbour's garden or the base of your own wall.
Delicate surfaces. Old render and weathered tiles cannot take much pressure, so they are soft washed or brushed by hand, which is slower than lancing block paving.
Treatment. A plain rinse only lasts a season. A biocide, sometimes with a second visit, keeps the growth off far longer.
Other firms quoting should be able to tell you how they will clean the roof, the walls and the paving, whether a biocide goes on afterwards, and where the dirty water will drain.
If there is a date
A sale, a viewing or a deadline to hit
Exterior cleaning is rarely an emergency, but it usually has a date on it: a sale, a viewing, scaffolding coming down or a family event. A slippery path or step is the exception, so grit it or keep people off it for now.
Tell us the date on the phone, and if you get no answer we will ring you when we can. We look at every surface and say honestly whether the date is realistic, since biocide treatments need dry weather to work. Cleans are scheduled Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
The one local thing
Everything the trees drop lands on your roof first
Furzehill sits with woodland, hedgerow and heath on its doorstep, and that decides how often you need a clean, not whether you need one. Leaf litter, pine needles and seed all end up in the same places: the gutter, the valley and any flat roof over a porch or a garage.
Shade from the same trees keeps a roof slope and the fascia under it damp, and a damp surface greens over again whatever you wash it with. Anybody who tells you a roof clean lasts a decade has not looked at the trees over your house.
In practice that changes how you buy this work. The roof clean and the gutter clearing want to be the same visit, because the access is most of what you are paying for and doing them separately means paying to get up there twice.
And the house on the tree side of a lane needs looking at more often than the one opposite, so a maintenance interval somebody quotes you off a spreadsheet is meaningless until they have stood in your garden and looked at what is overhanging the roof. When we come, we set up the same way every time: planting sheeted, gullies and drains covered, and the scraped moss bagged and taken away rather than washed into the borders.
Who you are dealing with
Who cleans the outside of your Furzehill home
Our base in Boscombe is roughly eight miles from Furzehill, and we clean roofs, render and drives across Holt, Three Legged Cross, Colehill and most of BH21. Dorset Council is the local council. The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales with company number 15471719. Before you book a visit in Furzehill, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Thomas Hannen owns it, and he looks over the whole outside of your house and prices it himself. One verified Checkatrade customer scored us 10 out of 10. We make no charge for the visit or the written quote, which sets out each surface.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Furzehill?
Most repairs in Furzehill 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 Furzehill |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Furzehill. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Furzehill, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Furzehill. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Furzehill. |
Questions
Questions about exterior cleaning in Furzehill
Our drive is on wet ground and never dries. Will cleaning help?
Cleaning will get the drive looking right, but the ground is why it goes green again. Furzehill sits on impeded drainage, so surface water lingers under the blocks instead of soaking away and the joints stay damp for weeks after rain. A wash plus a biocide gets you a good deal further than a wash on its own.
If water stands in the same two places every time, the fall or the sub base is the fix and we will say so.
Do we need anything from Dorset Council to clean the house?
No, Furzehill has no conservation area of its own and there are only 14 listed entries in the area, Wilksworth Farmhouse among them, so for almost everyone here washing render, tile or block paving is maintenance and the council has no interest in it. The Green Belt line around the village governs putting up new building, not the state of what is already standing. If yours is the listed one, the method changes, not the paperwork.
The garage flat roof is packed with needles. Does that matter?
It matters more than the house roof does. Woodland close to Furzehill drops needles and fine debris most of the year, and a flat roof has nothing to shed them, so they lie in a wet mat over the outlet and rot the covering underneath. We brush and bag rather than flush, because that spoil is grit and organic sludge you do not want washing into a soakaway on ground that already drains badly.
Is the concrete tile on a 1970s house safe to soft wash?
Yes on most of them, with a look first. Nearly half the stock here, 46.8%, went up between 1945 and 1982, and the interlocking concrete tile of that period loses its surface as it ages. Soft washing does not strip it further; a lance would. Where a tile is already spalling and shedding grit into the gutter, cleaning makes the roof look worse, not better, and we tell you that on the visit.
Can you reach the back without coming through the house?
Usually, yes: bungalows make up 25.5% of the dwellings here and most of the rest are detached, so there is a side gate rather than a shared alley. We work off a pole from the ground where we can and bring a tower only where height or pitch forces it. What slows us is a narrow side passage with bins and a fence panel in it, so clearing that keeps our kit out of your hallway.
Nearby, and next door
Exterior cleaning near Furzehill
Nearby places we also cover for exterior cleaning, with straight-line distances from Furzehill, and the other trades we offer in Furzehill itself.
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Our other trades in Furzehill
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A free visit, a survey of every surface and an itemised written quote. Furzehill, Holt and the rest of BH21.