Fascias, soffits and guttering in Bashley
Bungalow eaves, gable verges and garage runs stripped off and renewed, with the timber behind the boards checked before anything new goes back on.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Nearly every roofline in Bashley is low enough to reach off a tower, which makes it cheap to get to and easy to do badly. What decides the job is not the plastic on the front. It is whether the rafter feet behind it are still sound.
Most calls here start the same way. A run has dropped at one end and now holds a puddle. A soffit under the garage eaves has gone soft. Or the paint on a timber bargeboard has blown and the joints have opened up. A bungalow shows you all of that from the lawn, which is the one advantage of a low roof.
We come out and push a screwdriver into the fascia beside a bracket. That settles whether you are looking at a repair, a capping job or a full strip and renew. The site visit and the written itemised quote are both free.
The work
Long low eaves, and the first plastic reaching the end
What is actually failing. Paint blown off a timber fascia. A soffit gone dark and soft. A gutter pulled away from the wall, or a run sagging between brackets. A leaking joint at a union. Or a clear gutter overflowing in a downpour. Sound timber stops a screwdriver; rotten timber takes it like cork, and then the board is finished and the brackets have nothing to hold. Fascia, soffit, bargeboard and capping come off together.
The run and its parts. Gutter lengths, the unions between them, the brackets, the outlet, a hopper head where there is one, then the downpipe and the shoe at the bottom. The old run comes down rather than being patched. Brackets go back at the spacing that profile was designed for, every union keeps the gap it needs to move, and the whole thing is hung to a fall set off a string line. Half round is the ordinary bungalow profile, ogee sits flat against the fascia and carries more, square is the modern version, and a long hip feeding one outlet wants deepflow or a second outlet rather than another clear out.
Boards and materials. Much of the 1990s housing here is still on its first uPVC roofline, and the board fitted then is thinner than anything we would put up now, so it flexes between rafters and works the bracket screws loose. Painted timber is still on the older bungalows and the outbuildings, and it rots from the end grain and the joints inwards. Cast iron on the pre-war cottages rusts from the inside, because the back of a run is the one face no brush reaches. Seamless aluminium is rolled to length on site and hung in one piece.
Under the board. Once the old fascia is down the eaves is open and you can see what you have actually got. The new board screws to the rafter feet, so soft feet make everything else academic. Under them runs the wall plate, carrying the roof. A tilt fillet sets the bottom course of tiles at the angle that throws water into the run, and the underlay wants a felt support tray beneath it so it drips clear instead of soaking back into the timber. BS 5534 covers how that eaves is meant to be built. Capping is worth having over painted timber that is dry and hard. Over anything soft it is a lid, not a repair.
Ventilation, water and wildlife. On a bungalow the roof space sits directly over every room, and its whole ventilation path is the soffit vents plus the air gap above the insulation. Shut that with a solid board and January brings condensation on the underside of the felt and mould on rafters that were fine. Where there is no soffit to work with, an over fascia vent does the same job from on top. Approved Document F sets out what is expected of eaves ventilation. The other end of the system matters just as much: a downpipe needs a gully or a soakaway set far enough from the house to actually take the water. Left to spit at the wall, or let past the back of the gutter, it puts staining down the render and driving rain off the south west keeps it wet. Starlings will nest behind a soffit through any open joint, wasps go in higher up, and moss and debris washed off the tiles pack an outlet before anything else fails.
How it runs
From your call to a written price
Same team from first visit to last, one person to ring, and no sub-contracting your work out to somebody you have never met. The quote is itemised, not a figure on the back of a card: access, the length of each run, stripping the old boards and gutter, the fascia, soffit and any bargeboard, the gutter, outlets and downpipes, and disposal on separate lines, so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.
Nothing is left open or unusable overnight. The site is swept at the end of each day rather than the end of the job, and what comes out leaves with us. If something turns up once we start that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on.
Putting boards and rainwater goods back as they came off is repair, not building work, so nothing goes to planning and nothing goes to building control, and regulation 12 of the Building Regulations 2010 is where that line sits. Bashley sits on the edge of the New Forest National Park, and the boundary does not follow the village, so it is worth checking which authority your address falls under on the Park's own property map. Nothing here is in a conservation area, and on a listed building the gutters and hoppers count as part of the fabric.
Cost
What decides the price of a roofline
No rate per square metre, because a metre of fascia over a bay is not the same metre as one on a straight gable.
Getting to it. A bungalow eaves you can walk a tower along, a chalet with a dormer over the front door and a detached house with a conservatory beneath the back run all set up differently. A bungalow run comes off a tower, a two or three storey gable wants a scaffold, and a run over a conservatory or a bay window means building the platform around it. The work at height rules are why the access is a priced line rather than something absorbed into a rate.
What is behind the boards. Rotten fascia is a symptom. The question is whether the rafter feet and the wall plate behind it are still sound, and nobody knows until the old board comes off. Capping over with plastic hides that instead of fixing it, which is why we take the old boards off rather than clad them.
The run, not the metre. A straight gable is quick. Bay windows, a conservatory in the way, a corner return, a run that has to be worked around a satellite dish or a service cable, and every outlet, hopper and downpipe are priced one at a time. So is putting the fall back: a gutter hung level looks fine and holds water all year.
Comparing quotes? Ask whether the old boards are coming off or being capped over, what happens if the rafter feet or the wall plate turn out to be rotten, whether the gutter, outlets and downpipes are all being renewed or only the fascia, and whether the scaffold is in the price. Two quotes for the same job are usually two different jobs.
If a section has come away
A gutter hanging off, or a fascia gone through
Ring rather than use the form. A length of gutter pulled off its brackets, a downpipe snapped at the bend or a fascia soft enough to put your hand through goes to the front of the queue, because the next heavy rain runs straight down the wall and into the brickwork. The first visit is about getting it supported and discharging somewhere sensible, and we price the run properly once we can see how far the rot goes. Bashley is about ten miles out and we are through New Milton most weeks, so a run hanging on one bracket is normally seen the same day or the next. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
Worth knowing
A bungalow has twice the roofline for the same floor
Four in ten homes here are bungalows, and that changes the arithmetic more than people expect. Spread the same floor area over one storey and you get roughly twice the roof, so twice the length of eaves, more gable verge, more corners and usually an extra downpipe. A roofline quote for a bungalow is longer than one for a two storey house of the same size, and that is length rather than markup.
The good news sits on the other side. Almost all of it is low enough to work off a tower rather than a scaffold, so the access line stays small, and there is no sense doing the front this year and the back next. Doing the whole plot in one visit, garage and porch included, costs less per metre than setting up twice. It is also the moment to sort the eaves ventilation, because that roof space sits straight over your bedrooms.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We cover Bashley, New Milton, Barton on Sea, Ashley, Hordle and Sway, broadly BH25. You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, the trading name of 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
Bashley questions we get asked
Can you do the garage and the porch at the same time?
Yes, and it is cheaper to. Outbuilding runs are usually the oldest thing on the plot and the first to fail, so leaving them off the quote means paying twice for the same set up.
Is capping over the old boards a fair option here?
Only over dry, sound, painted timber, where it saves stripping a roof edge with years left. Over a soft board it seals wet wood out of sight and gives the new brackets nothing to bite into. If nobody has taken a board off, nobody knows which you have.
Ladder, tower or scaffold on a bungalow?
For refixing a bracket or a downpipe clip it is short duration work, and the HSE are clear that a ladder still has its place. For stripping boards off we want a tower so the run can be worked along properly, and access sits on the quote as its own line.
The gutter is clear and it still runs over. Why?
The fall or the profile, usually. A run hung level, or dropped away from the outlet, holds water and spills at the low point. A long hip feeding one outlet can be beyond what half round will carry. We check the fall and count the outlets first.
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Find out whether the boards have gone or just the paint
Thomas Hannen prices every job himself, and on a bungalow he can be up on the eaves and back down inside ten minutes. Free visit, free written itemised quote.