Fascias, soffits and guttering in Everton

The elevation that takes it. One side of your house always goes first, and round here that is the side facing the weather. Paint lifts off the fascia and the bargeboard, the wood behind darkens and softens, and the screws holding the brackets rust away from the surface inwards. That is the elevation we test hardest, pushing a screwdriver in at the corners and by the doorway. If a cover board was fitted over the original timber at some point, it comes away too. Cladding over damp wood only postpones the bill, and the fresh brackets need something with strength in it. Boards go back in uPVC.

The sheltered side. Round the back the problem is usually the opposite. The run stays wet, moss and debris wash down off the tiles and pack the outlet, and the whole length sits blocked until it is overflowing in the first hard shower. Renewal there is the full set: brackets, unions, outlets, hopper heads, downpipes and shoes, hung falling to the outlet so the water leaves rather than lingers. Half round covers most houses, ogee suits a square edged fascia, and deepflow is the answer where a long low roof throws more at one channel than it can carry.

What the boards were hiding. Off comes the fascia and there are the rafter ends, the plate under them and the tilt fillet raising the bottom row of tiles. Wet timber is cut back and let in new. A felt support tray follows, so the underlay finishes over the front edge and drips where it should. Tiles lifted to reach it are refixed to the pattern in BS 5534. We also follow the downpipe to its end, because a pipe emptying onto a border rather than into a gully or a soakaway leaves the staining you can see from the road.

Ventilation, and the repairs that stay repairs. With a soffit off, eaves ventilation is cheap to build in. Vented panels, or over fascia vents on a shallow board, keep the air gap open above your loft insulation and stop condensation being blamed on the tiles. And a good share of the work here never gets that far: a weeping joint, a perished union, a bracket torn from soft wood, a snapped shoe. Those are refixed, re-hung or swapped on their own. Wasps come first, and a bird nest behind a soffit is closed up only when it is empty.

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 with a hedge along the boundary, a chalet with a dormer in the run and a house with a conservatory 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.

You are close enough to the water here that salt settles on everything and keeps it damp between showers. It does very little to a plastic fascia and a great deal to the metal holding it up. Bracket screws, the bolts through a cast iron union, the nails in an old timber soffit and the clips on a downpipe all corrode from the surface in, so a run can look perfectly sound from the drive while what is fixing it to the house has quietly given up. The first sign is usually a length that has dropped at one end after a gale.

So the question worth asking any quote here is what the fixings are made of. We use non ferrous or stainless fixings on the seaward elevations as a matter of course, and it is worth thinking about aluminium rather than plastic on a long run that takes the weather. If you have cast iron and it is sound, painting the back of the gutter as well as the face is what keeps it going in this air.

We cover Everton, Hordle, Milford on Sea, Lymington and New Milton, broadly SO41, under New Forest District 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.