Fascia, soffit and guttering replacement in Broadstone

The fascia has gone. That is the board running along the front of the rafter ends, and on a house of this age it is painted softwood with the paint peeling off it.

Very often a cover board was screwed over the top of it years ago, which keeps rain off the paintwork and keeps damp locked into the wood. The gutter is then hanging on brackets fixed to a board with nothing left in it. Everything comes away, soffit and bargeboard included, and uPVC goes back on. We will only cap over where the wood underneath is properly dry and firm.

The length has lost its fall. A run that dips in the middle stands full of water and is overflowing long before autumn. Renewing it means the whole set: brackets at sensible centres, unions, outlets, any hopper, the downpipes and their shoes. Profile is worth a moment. Half round is the usual choice, ogee sits flush to a square edged fascia, and deepflow shifts a great deal more, which is what a broad hipped roof pouring into one length wants. Cast iron is scarce on these roads, though aluminium earns its keep on a long exposed elevation, and we always follow the pipe down to see whether it finishes in a gully or simply soaks the border.

Water is getting in behind the gutter. With the fascia away you are looking at rafter ends, the wall plate under them, and the tilt fillet that lifts the first row of tiles. Wet ends are sawn off and made good. A felt support tray then carries the underlay over the front edge so its water lands in the channel, which is the single detail that decides whether a wall dries out after new guttering. Tiles lifted on the way are bedded back to the pattern given in BS 5534.

The eaves got sealed up. These lofts breathe at the edges and nowhere else, so a soffit going on without vents in it is a condensation problem waiting for a cold February. We fit vented soffit panels, or over fascia vents where the board is too shallow, keeping an air gap clear above the insulation. Not every Broadstone roofline needs replacing either. A dripping joint, a perished seal, a bracket torn out of soft wood, a snapped downpipe, an outlet packed solid with moss and debris off the tiles: those are refixed, re-hung or swapped individually, and anything nesting behind a soffit is dealt with humanely before it is closed up.

We do not work to a rate per metre. The length is the easy part to measure and the smallest part of the decision. Boards off or capped over. Plenty of post-war bungalows in Broadstone still have their original painted timber fascias, and some have already been capped in plastic by somebody else.

Capping over hides rot rather than fixing it. We take the old boards off, and that is when you find out whether the rafter feet and the wall plate are sound. That is the part nobody can price from the drive.

Corners and returns. A hipped bungalow has four external corners and the gutter has to turn every one of them. Add a bay window, a porch roof, a conservatory in the way or a satellite dish on the fascia and the fiddly work adds up. Every outlet, hopper and downpipe is priced one at a time, and so is putting the fall back into a gutter that has been hung level.

Height. Most of the roofline here is single storey and comes off a tower. A two storey detached or a chalet gable wants a scaffold, and the work at height rules are why access is its own line.

Worth asking anyone else: are the old boards coming off or being capped, what happens if the rafter feet are rotten, and are the gutter and downpipes being renewed as well as the fascia?

Most of Broadstone went up in one long stretch after the war, and a lot of it in the late fifties and early sixties. Whole roads went up within a couple of years of each other, with the same eaves detail, the same softwood and the same gutter run.

That is why the roofline here tends to fail street by street rather than house by house: if next door has had theirs off, and the pair over the road are showing black staining under the soffit, yours is the same age and the same specification.

Two useful things follow from that. Ask the neighbour who has had it done what was behind the boards, because if their rafter feet were sound yours very likely are too, and that is the part nobody can price from the ground. And if two or three of you go together, the access is the line on the quote that shares best. A tower or a scaffold that is already up and inspected costs less to move next door than to bring back in six months.

Thomas Hannen owns this firm, and he is the person who walks your roofline and writes the price. We are Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, working from Wolverton Road in Boscombe, which is 7.3 miles from Broadstone. Before you book a visit in Broadstone, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

We fit fascias, soffits and gutters in Broadstone, Dunyeats and Corfe Hills (BCP Council), and over to Corfe Mullen and Upton (Dorset Council). On Checkatrade we hold a verified customer score of 10 out of 10. You pay nothing for the visit or for the written quote, which breaks every item out.

Most repairs in Broadstone 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.