Exterior cleaning in New Milton
Roof, render, conservatory, gutter, drive and patio cleaning across New Milton and BH25. Treated properly so it stays clean, not blasted so it looks clean.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
The black staining on a New Milton roof is algae sitting in the surface of a concrete tile, and it comes off with a treatment rather than with pressure. We scrape the moss out by hand, treat the rest, and leave the tile intact. Nothing about the roof has failed just because it looks like this.
The calls come in three shapes here. Someone has had an offer accepted and wants the front of the house looking right for the survey and the photographs. Someone has watched the roof go from patchy to solid black over about four winters. Or the gutters are running over onto the path and it has started to green up underneath.
None of that is a repair. All of it is maintenance that has been left a bit long, which is normal. We come out, look at every surface you are thinking about, and price them one at a time so you can do the roof now and the drive in the spring if that suits you better.
The work
Estate roofs, conservatories and the things that go green first
Concrete tile roofs. Most of the housing here went up between the 1950s and the end of the 1980s, and what came with it was concrete interlocking tile. Concrete holds damp in its face in a way clay does not, so algae takes hold early and moss follows into the laps and along the ridge. We work off a roof ladder or a tower, scrape the laps and the ridge clear by hand, pull the growth out of the valley, and treat the whole slope with a biocide. What we will not do is jet wash it. The force takes the sand and cement face off an interlocking tile along with the colour, and a stripped tile stays porous for the rest of its life to look clean for one summer. The town sits under two miles from the water, and salt in the air keeps a surface damp between showers, so the treatment matters more here than the wash does.
The estates around the town are mostly painted render or masonry paint over block with brick to the ground floor. Painted surfaces want a genuine soft wash at low pressure with the treatment doing the work, because a lance held close drives water behind the paint film and lifts it in sheets six months later. Bare brickwork is cleaned gently, and if the pointing is soft we say so before we start. A lot of these houses had a conservatory added, and its roof shows dirt fastest and gets cleaned least. Glass and polycarbonate both come up well, but the part that matters is the box gutter where the conservatory meets the house, because when that silts up the overflow goes straight into the wall and nobody sees it happen. We clear it as part of the job.
Gutters, drives and communal areas. A quarter of the homes here are terraced, which means one continuous gutter run over several houses and one blockage affecting all of them. Clearing the run, flushing each downpipe and checking the outlet prevents most of the damage we see to fascias and render below. Block paving is the standard drive here: it comes up under controlled pressure and then wants a re-sand, because washing the black spot and the weed out takes the jointing sand with it. Another quarter of the homes in the town are flats, and the work there is usually the bin store, the walkways, the car park and the paths rather than the roof. That is quiet work that has to be done without shutting the access, and we plan it so.
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. If something turns up that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on. Cleaning is maintenance, so nobody needs to give you permission for it. Two things that often follow a clean do need checking: cutting back the tree that caused the shade, which in this town very often has a preservation order on it, and painting a wall that has never been painted. New Forest District Council is the authority, and the Planning Portal lists other permissions you may need.
Cost
What decides the price of a clean
No rate per square metre: the same square metre can be twenty minutes or two. A flat above a shop in the town centre, a detached house with a conservatory across the back and a bungalow you can walk a reach pole right around are three different jobs before anyone turns a tap on. 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 often has a date on it: a sale, a letting inspection, scaffolding coming down. New Milton is about a half hour run for us, so a date a fortnight out is usually workable and a date this Friday usually is not. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
The one local thing
The trees are protected, so the cleaning is the answer
New Milton has far more mature tree cover than a town this size normally does, and a great deal of it is covered by tree preservation orders. That matters to you the moment you work out why one elevation of your house is green and the other is not.
The usual fix people reach for is to take the overhanging limb off, get the light and the air moving, and let the wall dry out on its own. Here you often cannot simply do that. Work on a protected tree needs written consent from the council first, and that takes weeks even when the answer is yes. Cutting first and asking afterwards is an offence, not a telling off.
So on a shaded elevation under a protected tree, cleaning stops being a one off and becomes the maintenance that replaces the pruning you are not allowed to do. Practically, that changes two things. First, the treatment matters more than the wash: killing the spores in the surface buys you years, where a rinse buys you a season.
Second, the gutters under those trees want doing more than once a year, because leaf litter and needles will fill an outlet in one autumn and the overflow will undo everything you paid for on the wall below. If you tell us which trees are yours and which are protected, we will build the visit around that rather than quoting you for a clean that will not last.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We work across New Milton, Barton on Sea, Bashley and the villages either side, and BH25 is a short run from us. 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
New Milton questions we get asked
Is a 1980s house too new to need this doing?
No. A third of New Milton went up between 1983 and 2008, with the 1980s alone accounting for 19.9%, and those houses came with dry verges, plastic gutters and interlocking concrete tiles. Concrete holds moss better than clay once the surface has weathered, so a forty year old estate roof often looks worse than a Victorian slate. It is a cleaning job rather than a repair, which is the good news.
We are mid terrace. Can you do just our length of gutter?
We can, though on its own it rarely fixes much. Terraces are 25.4% of the stock in New Milton and a terrace gutter is one continuous run over several houses, so a blockage two doors down still backs up over your bay. We will clear your length and report what we can see either side of it, and if the neighbours want theirs doing it goes on one visit and one schedule.
We are nearly two miles inland. Does salt still reach us?
It does. New Milton sits 2.8km back from the water and a south westerly carries salt that far without difficulty, which is why gutter brackets and nail heads on the exposed side corrode before anything else. It is milder than on a house sitting right on the shore, and it still shortens the life of every metal fixing on that elevation. That is the wall we do first and check the brackets on.
Can you get it done before a viewing?
Usually, if there is a week or two in it. What lifts a photograph most is the front elevation, the drive and the gutter line, in that order, so where time is short we do those and leave the back for later. On the newer estates here it is the block paving that dates a house, because the sand washes out and weeds follow. Cleaned and re sanded, it reads as maintained.
What is on the written quote if I only want the roof?
The roof and nothing else, priced as its own line. A quote at New Milton gets split by elevation and by surface, so covering, render, gutters, soffits, drive and patio each stand alone and you take the ones you want. Thomas Hannen writes it after the visit rather than over the phone, because a photograph will not show whether a ridge is loose. VAT is added on top as we are a limited company.
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Get every surface priced separately
Free site visit across BH25. Take the roof now and the drive later if that suits you, and you will still have the price for both in writing.