Fascias, soffits and guttering in Bere Regis

Start with the symptom. Nearly all of it can be read from the garden the morning after a downpour. A dip in the middle of a length means the fall is gone. A fan of wet render under one point means that union is leaking. Water arriving on the wall behind the channel, rather than overflowing at the lip, means the tray at the back has perished. Paint that has blistered and lifted tells you the board has been wet a long time, and a green trail down the elevation tells you how long.

Off, not over. Fascia, soffit and any bargeboard are taken away rather than hidden behind a cover board. Cladding a soft fascia seals moisture against it and hands your new brackets a board that will not hold a screw. Where the wood is bone dry and firm we are happy to cap over it and will say so on the quote. Old iron on the cottages we would rather save than skip, and the replacement boards are uPVC.

Opening up the eaves. Behind that board sit the rafter ends, the wall plate carrying them, and the tilt fillet lifting the first row of tiles clear. Anything wet is cut away and pieced back in solid. A support tray is then fitted so the underlay lands over the front edge and delivers its water into the gutter. Tiles moved to reach it are refixed to the pattern in BS 5534.

The new run. Most village houses take half round comfortably. Ogee is the choice against a square edged fascia. Deepflow is for the roof that puts more through the channel than a standard section will shift. Brackets, unions, outlets, hoppers, downpipes and shoes all get renewed as one, screwed and clipped so the length falls steadily to its outlet. Level looks tidy and ponds all winter.

Air, wildlife and the small stuff. A soffit coming off is your chance at eaves ventilation, either through the soffit itself or over the top of the fascia where the board is shallow, keeping an air gap above the loft insulation and heading off condensation that otherwise gets reported as a leak. Smaller faults we simply refix or re-hang. Wasps first, birds once they have finished, and anything blocked with moss or debris cleared while the ladder is standing there.

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 cottage tight to the street, a bungalow with a garden all the way round it and a house with a lean-to under the back gutter are three different jobs. 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.

Out here a downpipe rarely goes into a public sewer. It drops into a gully at the bottom of the wall and from there into a soakaway in the garden, and on some of the older properties it simply discharges onto the ground or into a ditch. That matters, because a soakaway silts up and stops taking water long before anybody notices, and when it does the water backs up at the shoe and soaks the bottom of the wall instead. You get damp inside and everyone looks at the roof.

So in the next downpour, watch the bottom of the downpipe rather than the top. Running away cleanly means your problem is up at the gutter. Pooling at the shoe or bubbling back out of the gully means no amount of new plastic at the eaves will fix it. Driving rain off the south west makes both worse, because it wets the boards and the wall together. Approved Document H covers where rainwater is allowed to go.

We cover Bere Regis, Wool, Wareham, Bovington and the villages between them, broadly BH20, under Dorset Council. 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.