Fascia, soffit and guttering replacement in Bere Regis

The symptom comes first. 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, never 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 Bere Regis 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 Bere Regis 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.

A metre of fascia on a straight gable and a metre around a bay are different jobs, so there is no rate per metre here.

How you reach it. Bungalow eaves come off a tower. A two storey Bere Regis cottage on the lane needs a scaffold that keeps people walking past it safely, and a run over a conservatory needs a platform built around the glass. Those set-ups are why the work at height rules show up as their own line.

What is behind the board. A soft fascia means the timber behind it, the rafter feet and the wall plate, has been wetted too. Nobody knows how far it has gone until the board is off, and on an older roof that repair can be a real part of the price.

Material. uPVC, timber painted to match, and cast iron or aluminium gutters are all different costs. Inside the conservation area, or where the house is listed, the material may be decided for you.

Where the water goes. Bere Regis sits on chalk, which drains freely, but water still belongs in a soakaway away from the footings. A downpipe that spills beside the wall rather than into a drain keeps them wet, so reconnecting it to a proper gully is worth pricing in.

When another firm quotes in Bere Regis, get straight answers on the old timber, the rafter ends and the downpipes. Will they strip the old timber or clad over it? Who pays if the rafter ends have gone soft? Does the price cover new downpipes, hoppers and outlets, or the fascia alone?

Out in Bere Regis 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.

Bere Regis sits 17 miles west of our base in Boscombe. We cover the village, Wool, Bovington, Wareham and the lanes in between, all in BH20 and all under Dorset Council. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Before you book a visit in Bere Regis, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

The owner, Thomas Hannen, comes out, looks along your roofline and works out the price himself, so the person quoting is the person answerable for the job. On Checkatrade a verified customer gave us 10 out of 10. There is no charge for the visit, and the quote, which lists every run and every item, is free as well.

Most repairs in Bere Regis need no application at all. What decides whether a change to the outside of your house does is who the council is, whether a conservation area or a listing applies, and whether the place sits in a protected landscape.