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.
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 rather than 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.
People ring us here for four things, in roughly this order. 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. Most of Lytchett Matravers is 1970s and early 1980s stock, so the bulk 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 and gutters. Many of the older concrete drives here 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 every outlet, downpipe and valley is cleared and run through with water to prove it takes it.
How it runs
From your call to a written price
One team from the first visit to the last, one person to ring, and no sub-contracting. The quote is itemised: method for each surface, protection, access and where the water and residue go, each on its own line. Anything we find once we start that nobody could have seen comes to you as a photograph and a price before we carry on. Cleaning is maintenance, so there is nothing to apply for. It matters here only in what comes after: if the wash shows up joints that want raking out and repointing, and the building is one of the fifteen listed entries, that repair needs listed building consent first. Dorset Council is the authority.
Cost
What decides the price of a clean
No rate per square metre: the same square metre can be twenty minutes or two. A bungalow off the estate roads is reach pole work from the ground, a two storey house wants a tower for the gable, and a terrace of cottages means moving the setup several times in a day. The work at height rules decide which. The surface sets the method, and getting it wrong takes the finish off with the dirt. Comparing quotes, ask what method each surface gets, whether a treatment is included or just a rinse, and where the run off goes.
If there is a date
A viewing, a visit or a deadline
Ring rather than use the form. This is not emergency work, but it usually has a date on it: a sale, a letting inspection, scaffolding coming down. Tell us the date and we will say honestly whether it can be done properly by then. Lytchett Matravers is about twenty minutes from us, so a look is quick. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
Worth knowing
The old walls here, and why they never see a lance
Walk the middle of the village 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 rather than 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
A local firm you can check
We cover Lytchett Matravers, Lytchett Minster and Upton on BH16, out to Corfe Mullen, Broadstone and Poole, and Dorset Council is the planning authority for this address. 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
Lytchett Matravers questions we get asked
Nearly a quarter of the village is bungalows. Does that change things?
It changes how we reach it. Bungalows are 24.9% of the stock in Lytchett Matravers, and a 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.
The gutters fill with needles every autumn. Why so fast?
Because the heath and woodland edge sits hard against the village, and needles do not rot down the way leaf litter does. They pack in behind the bracket and hold water against the fascia all winter. Drainage round here is slightly impeded, so what overflows soaks in at the base of the wall rather than running away. We clear by vacuum and check the outlets while we are up.
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 overnight accommodation, so they touch a loft conversion, not 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 nine miles out. How quickly can you come and look?
Lytchett Matravers is about nine miles from us, so the look round is usually inside the week. 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.