Exterior cleaning in Lytchett Matravers
Roofs, render, walls, gutters, drives and patios across Lytchett Matravers and BH16. Free site visit, free written itemised quote.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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Almost everything people call a dirty roof in Lytchett Matravers is moss, and moss comes off a tile with a scrape and a low pressure soft wash, not a jet wash. The village sits on a ridge with clay under it and rain most months, so growth is normal here, not a sign anything has failed.
What matters is the method: put a lance on a concrete tile and you take the face off it, and put one on the old lime mortared walls along the High Street and you wash the joints out.
In Lytchett Matravers the roof, the drive, a shaded gable or the gutters usually need attention. A roof has gone green and dark and somebody selling the house has been told to sort it. A block paved drive has weeds in the joints and black staining across the parking bay. Render or painted masonry on a gable has greened over on the shaded side and looks nothing like the rest of the house. Or the gutters have stopped taking water and there is a streak running down the wall underneath.
The answer is not the same for all four. We look at what is growing, what it is growing on and how thick it has got, then match the method to the surface. Some of it is a treatment and a wait rather than a clean. Some of it is twenty minutes with a lance and a surface cleaner. The free site visit exists to tell you which, and you get that in writing before anyone books a day.
The work
What we clean around the village
Concrete tile, and no jet wash. Much of Lytchett Matravers is post-war, with about four in ten homes built between 1945 and 1982, so a good share of the village wears concrete interlocking tile on a mortar bedded ridge.
Moss sits in the channel of the tile and packs into the lap where one course sits over the next, and a packed lap pushes water sideways under the covering. It comes off dry with a scrape and a brush, then a biocide at low pressure through a soft wash lance kills the spores left in the surface. We do not jet wash a concrete tile: the force strips the cement fines off the top, the tile then holds water like a sponge, and the regrowth is worse than when you started.
The older walls in the middle of the village want the opposite. There are fifteen listed entries in and around Lytchett Matravers, the parish church among them, and cottages of the same age along the High Street with no designation at all: soft handmade brick, rubble stone and lime mortar, some under a lime render. Those are brushed and treated at low pressure, because the joint is softer than the stone either side of it. On the newer houses green on render is algae and wipes off, while black spot is lichen rooted into the surface and wants a treatment and time. Chalky masonry paint comes off in sheets under a lance, so a test patch goes out of sight first.
Drives. Many of the older concrete drives in Lytchett Matravers were block paved over, and the wash lifts the kiln dried sand out of the joints with the weed, so every joint is re-sanded or the blocks rock by summer. Mature trees and long back gardens fill the gutters with leaf litter as well as roof moss, so clearing them is worth booking with the roof.
How it runs
Washing roofs, walls and paths without harming them
Thomas walks round every surface you want cleaned and prices each one himself: roof, walls, paths and drive. The quote spells out the method for each, how plants and windows are protected, the access, and where the dirty water goes. The clean is then carried out to that quote. Should the wash expose cracked render or open joints, you are shown them and given a separate price before any repair.
On the concrete tile roofs of the post-war houses in Lytchett Matravers, moss comes off by hand scraping and a soft wash with a biocide, not a pressure washer, which strips the surface and drives water under the tiles. Brick and render get a low pressure wash. Block paving gets a rotary clean and fresh jointing sand. We cover plants and ponds, keep the run-off out of any drain that leads to a stream, and leave the drive rinsed clean.
Cleaning is maintenance, so there is nothing to apply for. It matters only in what comes after. If the wash shows joints that need repointing and the building is one of the fifteen listed entries, that repair needs listed building consent first. Dorset Council is the authority.
Cost
Tiles, render and block paving each need their own method
One square metre of roof can take a few minutes or most of an hour, so a flat rate would be a guess.
Height. A bungalow is reach pole work from the ground. A gable on a detached house with an upstairs wants a tower, and the work at height rules decide which.
The surface. Concrete roof tiles, painted render, facing brick and block paving each take a different method and pressure. Getting it wrong takes the finish off with the dirt, and on render it can open hairline cracks to water.
Treatment or rinse. A rinse makes it look clean for a season. A biocide kills the roots of moss and algae so it stays clean for longer, and it has to be a product used under the biocides regime the HSE administers. It also needs a dry day or two to work.
Dirty water. Wash water carrying moss and biocide must not go into a surface water drain, and pollution prevention guidance sets out what that means on a job.
Before you pick a quote, find out the method for each surface, whether moss and algae are treated or just washed, and where the dirty water is going.
If there is a date
A sale, a letting inspection or a date to meet
Nobody's house falls down for want of a wash, but cleaning often runs to a deadline: photos for an estate agent, a tenant moving in, a scaffold coming down after other work. Give us the date when you call and we will tell you honestly if it can be done properly in time.
A biocide needs a dry spell to take, so a roof clean cannot be squeezed into a wet week. With a tight date, phone us. Booked cleaning is Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. If you get no reply, you will get a call back from us as soon as we can.
Worth knowing
The old walls here, and why they never see a lance
Walk the middle of Lytchett Matravers and the fabric changes under your hand. The cottages along the High Street are soft handmade brick, rubble stone and lime mortar, and a fair number of them have a lime render or a limewash over the top.
Lime mortar is deliberately weaker than the brick or the stone it beds. That is the point of it: the joint is the sacrificial part, so when the wall moves or freezes the mortar takes the damage instead of the face of the brick.
It also means a pressure washer will find that joint first. A lance held on soft old brickwork blows the mortar out to a depth you cannot see from the ground, drives water deep into a solid wall that has no cavity to drain it, and takes the fired skin off the brick face so that the next hard frost spalls it. The wall looks clean for a season and then starts shedding.
So on anything of that age we work the other way round. Loose growth is brushed off dry. A biocide is put on at low pressure through a soft wash nozzle, wetting the surface, not blasting it, and then left. Lichen and algae die back over weeks rather than minutes, so a proper job on an old wall is often a treatment now and a light rinse later rather than one noisy afternoon.
Planting at the foot of the wall is sheeted and watered down first, and any gully or drain in the path is covered, which is what the pollution prevention guidance for this kind of work expects and what the HSE guidance on using biocides is about. If you want a date for it, ask for the second visit to be written into the quote rather than assumed. That is the line that separates two prices for the same wall.
Who you are dealing with
Who cleans the outside of your house
Thomas Hannen, who owns the business, comes out to look at the surfaces and price the clean. Boscombe is about eleven miles from Lytchett Matravers, and from there we cover Lytchett Minster and Upton on BH16, out to Corfe Mullen, Broadstone and Poole, with Dorset Council as the planning authority.
Behind the name is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. A verified customer left us 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. Neither the visit nor the itemised written quote costs you anything. Before you book a visit in Lytchett Matravers, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Lytchett Matravers?
Most repairs in Lytchett Matravers 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 Lytchett Matravers |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Lytchett Matravers. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Lytchett Matravers, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Lytchett Matravers. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Lytchett Matravers. |
Questions
Questions about exterior cleaning in Lytchett Matravers
There are plenty of bungalows here. Does that change things?
A bungalow changes how we reach the roof. On a Lytchett Matravers bungalow the single storey roof can usually be washed and treated from a telescopic lance off the ground, with no scaffold and no ladder standing in a flower bed. The gutter run is short too, so the vacuum pole clears it from the drive. Two storey houses here still need a tower.
Why does the paving by the heath stay green?
Because the heath and woodland edge sits hard against the village, and needles do not rot down the way leaf litter does. They collect in the joints and corners of paving and hold damp there, and drainage around Lytchett Matravers is slightly impeded, so the ground by the wall stays wet. A wash, a treatment and re-sanded joints keep it back. Needles in the gutters are a separate clear, and left there they hold water against the fascia all winter.
Does the Poole Harbour catchment stop you washing a house here?
It does not. The nutrient rules for the Poole Harbour Ramsar site only bite when a scheme adds a new home or new overnight accommodation, so they touch a new build, not an extension or a wash down. What still matters is where the water and the growth end up. We cover the beds, collect what comes off the tiles and keep the run off out of the ditch and off the road. That is ordinary pollution control, not planning.
There are listed cottages on the main street. Can they be cleaned?
They can, but not with a pressure washer. Fifteen entries in Lytchett Matravers are listed, including the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, and on that sort of fabric the soft mortar and the face of the brick come off before the dirt does. We work at low pressure and let a biocide do the rest. Anything that seals or recolours a listed wall is a question for Dorset Council first.
You are eleven miles out. How quickly can you come and look?
Lytchett Matravers is about eleven miles from us, and we agree a day for the look round when you ring. Thomas Hannen comes out himself, walks the elevations, gets on a ladder if the gutter needs seeing, and writes the quote up itemised so the roof, the render and the paving are separate lines. The visit and the written quote cost nothing, and you can take one line and leave the rest.
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Tell us the address and what has gone green. We come out, look at the surface and put an itemised price in writing. No charge for either.