Exterior cleaning in Longham
Roof cleaning, render and cladding soft washing, block paving and gutter clearing across Longham, Ferndown and West Parley.
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 Longham needs no scaffold in the price, because nearly all of it is single storey. On a bungalow we reach the whole roof, the walls and the fascias off a pole from the ground, and the soft wash is usually done in a day.
Signs a Longham house is due a clean: The roof has gone green and it is now visible from the road. The block paved drive is black, and the bit under the car is a different colour from the bit that is not. Or the gutters are overflowing at the back where the willows and alders along the Stour have filled them.
We survey the lot on a free site visit, price each surface on its own line, and tell you plainly if one of them is not worth doing yet. Nothing here needs a scaffold tower on a normal bungalow, and we will say so rather than quote for one.
The work
Bungalow roofs, big drives and conservatories
Bungalow roofs. Nearly everything around Longham is concrete interlocking tile on a shallow pitch, and more than a third of the dwellings are bungalows, which carry roughly twice the roof area of a two storey house with the same floor space.
That is a lot of surface for moss to sit on. We scrape the growth out of the laps and off the ridge, clear the gutter and the valley where two ranges meet, then put a biocide over the whole slope. Reach poles from the ground do most of Longham, so a roof clean here is a day rather than a week with a platform.
Painted render, dry dash and the uPVC or timber effect cladding that went on a lot of these houses in the eighties all come up on a low pressure soft wash with a treatment behind it. Pebbledash in particular is a trap: a lance will take the pebbles off in stripes and you will never match the patch. Brickwork, masonry plinths and a painted rendered gable get the same low pressure approach.
Plots here are wide and the driveways are large, mostly block paving, concrete or tarmac with a patio round the back. Block paving is jet washed and then re-sanded, because the kiln dried sand in the joints is what stops the blocks rocking and the weeds returning. We will seal a driveway afterwards if you want it sealed, but only once the blocks and the sub base have dried out. Oil under where the car sits is a separate treatment and does not always come out completely.
Low eaves make gutter clearing here quick, and the fascia, the soffit and the conservatory roof are washed while the pole is up.
Before the water runs. Planting is watered and sheeted, the gully by the garage and any open drain gets covered, and vents and outside lights are protected. A biocide is used at the dilution on the label, only on surfaces it is approved for, and it does not go into a drain, which is what the biocides regime the HSE administers and pollution prevention guidance require. We would talk you out of an annual contract, when a treated roof around Longham should hold two or three years.
How it runs
Washing a roof, render and drive: the order we work in
Thomas looks at each surface himself and prices the job: the roof, any render, the drive and the patio. On a bungalow the roof is low and often concrete tiled, so moss can be scraped off by hand from a roof ladder and then treated, with no high pressure on the tiles.
Render is cleaned with a biocide and a soft wash, because a jet can take the surface off. Block paving and patios get a rotary clean and are then re-sanded.
Each surface gets its own line on the quote, saying how it will be cleaned, how your plants, glass and doors are covered, what access is used, and where the dirty water ends up. Once the roof is done, the moss that has fallen into the gutters is scooped out, bagged and taken away. A cracked tile or a blown patch of render that only shows once the surface is clean gets a photo and a price, and you choose.
There is no conservation area over Longham, so on almost every house washing is maintenance and needs no permission. On a listed building cleaning is fine, but sealing, painting or changing a finish can need listed building consent. On this side of Ferndown few addresses are affected, and we check yours first.
Cost
Moss, algae and access: pricing an exterior clean
Two roofs of the same size can take very different time, depending on how thick the growth is and how you get to it.
The roof. A Longham bungalow roof can often be reached with a roof ladder from the ground. A two storey roof, or a chalet with dormers cut into the slope, needs a tower or scaffold, and the work at height rules decide which. Deep moss on old concrete tiles is slow to scrape.
Treatment. Rinsing alone buys you one season. Spraying a biocide once the moss is off, under the biocides regime the HSE administers, kills what is left and slows it coming back.
Render and paving. Soft washing render takes care round windows and plants. A block paved drive needs cleaning, then kiln-dried sand brushed back into the joints, and that sand is a real cost on a long drive.
The run-off. Dirty water and biocide should not go into a surface water drain or soak into the soil by a pond, so where it goes is planned before we start.
Comparing quotes. Ask how each surface will be done, whether the spray treatment is in the price or it is just a wash, whether the block paving gets fresh sand, and where the dirty water goes.
If there is a date
A sale, a viewing or a date to hit
Exterior cleaning is not emergency work, but there is often a deadline behind it: the estate agent's photographer, a survey, or the scaffold being struck. Ring rather than use the form and give us that deadline, and you will get a straight answer on whether it can be done properly by then.
A roof treated with biocide takes weeks to clear fully as the dead growth weathers off, so the earlier the better. If a Longham bungalow is going on the market, the roof and the drive are what the photographs show first. Moss clogging the gutters is the one part that can cause damage, so mention it. Cleaning is booked Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. If we miss the call, we come back to you as soon as we can.
Worth knowing
Why these roofs all went green in the same few years
Six in ten homes in Longham went up between the war and the early eighties, and the biggest single group is late sixties and early seventies. That means the concrete interlocking tiles across whole streets here are the same age. A concrete tile leaves the factory with a fine surface layer on it, and over thirty or forty years of rain that layer weathers away.
What is underneath is more open and more porous, so it holds water for longer, and moss and algae key into it instead of sitting on top. That is why a run of houses can all look fine for years and then all go green within a season or two of each other.
What follows from it can save you money. First, green tiles of that age are not a sign the roof is failing, so nobody should be using the moss to sell you a re-roof. Second, the method matters more on a porous tile than it does on a newer one.
Pressure takes another layer off the surface, leaves it rougher and more absorbent than it was, and the growth comes back faster than before the clean. A scrape and a biocide leaves the tile alone and buys years. If we get up there and find tiles delaminating or nibs snapped off, we will tell you that cleaning is the wrong money and what the roof actually needs.
Who you are dealing with
Who cleans your roof and drive
You would be dealing with Thomas Hannen, who owns the firm, looks at every surface and prices the clean himself. The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales; its company number is 15471719. Before you book a visit in Longham, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
From our Boscombe base it is 4.7 miles to Longham, and our round here also takes in Ferndown, West Parley and the places down along the Stour, across the BH22 postcodes, under Dorset Council. A verified Checkatrade review from a customer scores us 10 out of 10. Both the visit and the written itemised quote cost you nothing.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Longham?
Most repairs in Longham 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 Longham |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Longham. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Longham, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Longham. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Longham. |
Questions
Questions about exterior cleaning in Longham
Why is a bungalow a bigger clean than the house next door?
Because you are paying for roof area, not floor area. Bungalows are 36.3% of the dwellings in Longham, and a bungalow puts the same accommodation under roughly twice the roof, with far more ridge, hip and verge for each household. That is more surface to treat and more edge to clear. Height is the one thing in your favour, since most of it is reachable from a pole or a low tower with no scaffold.
The lawn is boggy all winter. Does that affect the paving?
It does. Longham is on naturally wet ground, and paving bedded over it holds damp underneath even when the top looks dry, which is why the green is back on the shaded half of a patio before the sunny half has started. Cleaning deals with what is on the surface. Keeping it off longer means a biocide applied with dry days either side, and keeping soil and leaf litter off the edges.
Every house in the road went up together. Does that show?
On the roofs it does. 60.0% of the stock here was built between 1945 and 1982, peaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so a whole road was covered within a couple of seasons and the bedding at ridge and verge is reaching the same state together. When we wash a roof of that age we watch the mortar as we go, because a clean will expose a loose ridge tile the moss was propping up.
Can we do the drive on a different visit to the roof?
Yes, and the quote is written so that you can. Each surface goes on its own line, roof, render, gutters, paving, so one can come off without the rest being re-priced. Around Longham the frontages are wide and there is a fair amount of block paving, so the drive is often the largest single item on the sheet. Thomas Hannen prices it after looking, and neither the visit nor the written quote costs anything.
Are there any rules on this side of Ferndown?
Nothing that touches cleaning. No conservation area covers Longham, and there are 13 listed entries against roughly 2700 dwellings, so for practically every house here washing render, tile or paving is maintenance. Dorset Council only becomes involved if you change what a surface is made of, or paint something that was never painted before. Putting a surface back to the colour it already is does not count as a change.
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Exterior cleaning near Longham
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Tell us what has gone green and we will come and price each surface separately.