Exterior cleaning in Post Green
Roof, render, gutter, drive and patio cleaning around Post Green, Lytchett Minster and Upton. Contained, treated properly, and priced surface by surface.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
The commonest job we do around Post Green is not a wash at all, it is clearing gutters that have filled with pine needles and heath litter. Sort that first. Half the green staining people ring us about is a wall that has been soaked all winter by a gutter running over the top of it.
Three things bring people to the phone here. A roof that has gone green on the shaded pitch and is starting to show from the road. A wall streaked black under a gutter, usually with a downpipe that has stopped taking anything. Or a drive and a patio that have got slippery enough to be a nuisance in the dark.
It is all maintenance, so there is no rush and there is time to do it properly. We come out and look at everything, including the shed and the garage roofs that nobody thinks to mention, and give you a written price per surface so you can take the lot or take the gutters and think about the rest.
The work
Estate roofs, park homes and gutters full of needles
Gutters first. This is the job we do most here and the one worth doing before anything else. Pine needles are the worst thing that can land in a gutter, because they mat together into a felt that water will not carry away and they take years to rot. Add blown heath litter and moss off the roof and an outlet is gone in one autumn. Clearing the run, flushing every downpipe, proving the outlet takes water and checking the valley is a couple of hours, and it prevents most of what we later get asked to repair.
Most of the housing around here went up between the war and the early 1980s, so the covering is usually concrete interlocking tile with a mortar bedded or dry fixed ridge. Concrete holds damp in its face, so algae takes hold early and moss follows into the laps. We scrape the laps and the ridge clear by hand, pull the growth out of the valley, then treat the slope so the spores die back rather than regrowing next spring. No pressure washing of roofs: the force takes the sand and cement face off an interlocking tile and washes the mortar out from under a bedded ridge. Rendered and pebbledashed elevations are common on the estate housing and both want a genuine soft wash, low pressure through a wide nozzle with a treatment left to work. Pressure strips paint off masonry and knocks the stones out of pebbledash, and neither goes back. Lichen on a north wall is the slowest of the lot to shift.
Park homes, drives and conservatories. There are a good number of park homes and static caravans around here, and they are the one thing on this page where a jet wash will do damage every single time. Coated steel and vinyl cladding, plastic trims and sealed joints will not take pressure or a strong chemical, so they are washed by hand and by soft brush on a pole with the treatment matched to the coating. If a firm quotes you to pressure wash a park home, get somebody else. Block paving comes up under controlled pressure and then wants a re-sand, and on tarmac we use far less force than people expect. Felt garage roofs, timber sheds and conservatory glass all get cleaned the gentle way, and we clear the box gutter between a conservatory and the house while we are there, because that is the detail that quietly does the damage when it silts up.
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 and needs no consent. What needs a check is anything that changes how the building looks afterwards, such as painting a wall that has never been painted. Dorset Council is the authority here, the Lytchett Minster conservation area covers part of this patch, and there are eighteen listed entries nearby, Post Green House among them, where listed building consent comes before any change of appearance.
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 you can walk a reach pole all the way round, a detached house with a conservatory and a long gutter run at the back, and a park home that must not be pressure washed at all 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 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. Post Green is eight miles from us and sits on a road we are on anyway, so we can usually give you a firm date. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
The one local thing
Heath, pines and a catchment that ends in Poole Harbour
Post Green sits between woodland and open heath, on sand, with the Sherford River a short walk away and Poole Harbour beyond it. That gives you two things at once. The first is debris. Pine and birch shed all year rather than in one tidy fortnight, heath litter blows a long way in an easterly, and both end up in your gutters, your valleys and on any flat roof you own.
A property here wants its rainwater goods cleared twice a year, not once, and the honest version of that advice is that the second visit is cheaper than the fascia and the render you will otherwise be paying to put right.
The second is where the water goes when we have finished. Everything that runs off a roof or a drive on this side of the parish drains into ground that takes water quickly and then into the Sherford River and the harbour, which is a protected site. Biocide that reaches a watercourse is a genuine problem, not a technicality, so on every job here we block off the downpipes, cover the gully and any drain, keep the planting closest to the wall sheeted, and contain and collect rather than letting it run to the nearest ditch.
Debris is bagged and leaves with us. Pollution prevention rules set out what is allowed into a surface water drain, and the HSE publishes which products are approved for this work and what the label lets you do with them. It is worth asking whoever you use how they intend to handle this, because the cheapest quote on a heath edge property is usually cheap because nobody is containing anything.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We cover Post Green, Lytchett Minster, Upton, Lytchett Matravers and Holton Heath, and BH16 is a short run for 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
Post Green questions we get asked
Are we inside the Lytchett Minster conservation area here?
It covers Post Green, yes. The Lytchett Minster Conservation Area controls appearance, so like for like upkeep is fine and changing a material or a colour is not. A wash and a biocide alter nothing about how the building looks, they take it back to how it looked. Where it would matter is a roof coating, and we would not put one on inside the area without Dorset Council confirming it.
Nearly a third here are bungalows from the seventies. Anything specific?
The gutters, mostly. Bungalows are 30.6% of Post Green and 54.3% of it went up between 1945 and 1982, so you have long low runs of plastic gutter on brackets that have had fifty winters. They sag between fixings, hold silt, then overflow onto the render below. We vacuum them out from the ground and tell you which brackets have dropped, because clearing a sagging gutter buys a season and no more.
Post Green House is listed. Does that affect the houses around it?
Not on its own. There are eighteen listed entries around here, Post Green House among them, and a listing applies to the building and its curtilage rather than to the neighbours. The conservation area is the designation that reaches wider. On a listed building we drop the pressure right down, work by hand over lime mortar and soft brick, and leave anything that changes the finish until the council has looked.
The ground here holds water. Does that change how you work?
It changes where the wash water ends up. Drainage at Post Green is slightly impeded, so what comes off a roof lies on the surface and finds the lowest point instead of soaking in. On a job with heavy moss that means a mat and a bag rather than letting it run into the lawn. It also means no treatment is worked down a wall onto saturated ground beside a bed.
Will you need to come into the garden at the back?
Yes, and the gate wants to be wide and clear of bins and pots. On the plots here the rear elevation faces south south east and the boundary is usually close boarded fence with a narrow side path, so that gets looked at on the first visit. Where nothing will go through, the back is worked off poles from ground level, which is slower, and we say so before you agree anything.
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