Fascia, soffit and guttering replacement in Thorney Hill

The house comes first. The long back run and the weather elevation are the two that decide the job. Soft fascia, blown paint, a gutter sagging between brackets or a length pulled clean away from the wall all mean the same thing, and the only way to know how far it goes is to take the boards off.

Underneath sit the rafter feet, the wall plate and the eaves course. While it is open the tilt fillet is reset so the bottom tiles drip forward, a felt support tray takes the underlay over the edge, and the verge and eaves course are refixed as BS 5534 requires. The new soffit keeps its soffit vents, or an over fascia vent, so the air gap into the loft that Approved Document F is concerned with stays open and the felt above it stays dry.

The garage. Almost always the worst run on a Thorney Hill plot, because nobody looks at it. A detached garage often has one short gutter with no fall left in it and a downpipe finishing somewhere vague. An attached one usually tips into the house run through a hopper, and if the hopper is undersized or blocked with moss and debris it backs up and the water goes down the join between the two buildings. Both are quick work off a tower and both are cheap to get right at the same time as the house.

The porch and the bay. Short lengths, tight corners and more fittings per metre than anywhere else, which is why they cannot sensibly be priced by length. A bay wants stop ends, angles and often a curved or stepped run, and a porch usually discharges straight onto the path where a badly aimed shoe soaks the doorway and leaves green staining on the brickwork. These get their own lines on the quote and they take longer than their size suggests.

The conservatory or lean-to. Drainage and access both get harder. Whatever is above it has to discharge into a run big enough to take it, and a small profile overflowing onto glass is both noisy and a nuisance, so square, ogee or deepflow usually earns its place there. And the access platform has to be built round the structure rather than over it, which is a real cost and belongs on the quote as one rather than being buried somewhere.

Stables, workshops and the old outbuildings. These are where Thorney Hill's original materials survive. Cast iron on rise and fall brackets that can be stripped, re-bedded and repainted. Moulded timber that can be cut back to sound wood and spliced. Where iron has rusted through at the sockets, aluminium suits a long unbroken run better than plastic. There is rarely any reason to renew an outbuilding roofline at the same moment as the house, and we will say so.

Where they all join up. Last of all we follow the water. Every outlet, union and bracket is checked, each length is re-hung to a fall so nothing stands full, and each downpipe is clipped straight and finished with a shoe discharging into a gully or a soakaway clear of the footings. Open ends are closed so birds and wasps cannot nest behind a board. A plot where four buildings drain into one blocked outlet has one fault, not four, and it is worth finding before anybody replaces anything.

Two houses with the same length of eaves can be very different jobs, so a price per metre over the phone means little.

Height and the plot. A Victorian pair with eaves over a hedge, a detached house set back among trees, and a low bungalow each need different access. Work at height rules decide it, and access is priced separately.

Behind the boards. A soft fascia tells you water has been getting in, and the question is how far. The rafter ends and the wall plate can only be judged once the old board is off, so we remove boards rather than hide rot under plastic cladding.

Trees and the wind. Gutters under trees may want leaf guards or a deeper section, and a run on the south west side needs its brackets closer together to stay put in a gale.

Every outlet counts. Corners, downpipes and hoppers, and a run that has to go round a satellite dish, are each counted, as is re-hanging a gutter fitted dead level so that it falls to the outlet.

Ask other quotes whether the old boards are coming off or being clad over, what happens if the rafter feet are rotten, and whether the scaffold is included in the figure.

Thorney Hill is 6.8 miles from 80a Wolverton Road, Boscombe, where we are based. We fit rooflines across Thorney Hill, Bransgore, Burley, Crow, Sopley and Hinton, broadly BH23, and National Park planning rules apply at Thorney Hill itself.

The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, with company number 15471719. Thomas Hannen runs it, and he looks at each elevation and puts the roofline price together himself. Checkatrade shows one verified customer's 10 out of 10. You pay nothing for Thomas's visit or for the itemised quote he writes. Before you book a visit in Thorney Hill, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Thorney Hill 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.