Fascia, soffit and guttering replacement in Everton

The elevation that takes it. One side of your house always goes first, and around Everton 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 Everton 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. Plenty of roofline faults never get 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.

A roofline is not priced by the metre. A metre round a bay window takes far longer than a metre along a plain eaves.

A lot of edge. For its floor area, a bungalow has much more fascia and gutter than a two storey house, with a run on each side of a hipped roof. Length is the first thing on the quote.

Platform. Most bungalows in Everton need only a tower. A dormer, a conservatory under the rear gutter or a two storey gable changes that. Access is a separate line because the work at height rules set what the platform must be.

Rot you cannot see. Timber boards fitted when these Everton houses were new are often soft at the joints and behind the brackets. Nobody knows the state of the rafter ends and wall plate until the old board is off. Covering rotten timber with plastic just hides it, so we take the old boards down.

Salt. Near the sea, cheap steel brackets and screws rust quickly. Ask for stainless fixings on the seaward side.

Details. Each corner, outlet, hopper and downpipe is priced on its own, as is working round a satellite dish or a cable, and every gutter is set to a fall so it drains.

When comparing, ask whether old boards come down or get covered, what happens if the rafter ends are rotten, what the brackets and screws are made of, and whether the gutters and downpipes are new too.

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 in Everton is what the fixings are made of. Ask for non ferrous or stainless fixings on the seaward elevations, 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.

Our base in Boscombe is 10.8 miles from Everton. We fit fascias, soffits and gutters here and across Hordle, Tiptoe, Milford on Sea and New Milton, all under New Forest District Council. The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, which is registered in England and Wales as company 15471719. Before you book a visit in Everton, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Thomas Hannen owns and runs it, and he measures your runs and prices them in person. A verified Checkatrade customer gave us a score of 10 out of 10. You pay nothing for the visit or for the written quote, which lists each part.

Most repairs in Everton 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.