Fascia, soffit and guttering replacement in West Lulworth

What the wind does to the edge. Weather works on the perimeter of a building, not the middle of it, and the perimeter is exactly what this trade covers. Paint strips off a fascia and a bargeboard on the exposed side of a West Lulworth cottage long before the sheltered one.

Screws and bolts corrode from the surface inwards in West Lulworth's salt air, so a length can look sound while its fixings have quietly let go. Soft boards are lifted off rather than clad, since a cover board keeps damp against the timber and gives new brackets nothing to bite. Everything metal goes back non ferrous.

Iron worth saving. Older houses in West Lulworth carry cast channels on brackets in the rafter ends, ogee or half round, bolted at each union. The metal outlasts the joints and the paintwork by decades, so the sensible repair is lowering it, cutting the rust back, re-bedding and bolting the unions, painting the rear face as well as the front, and re-hanging it falling to the outlet. Where a section is past saving, a matching cast piece or an aluminium one that reads the same from the lane. uPVC is the sensible answer on a modern house or an elevation nobody sees.

Under the boards. With a fascia away you can see the rafter ends, the plate they bear on, and the tilt fillet raising the first course of tiles. Wet ends are cut back and pieced solid. A felt support tray then carries the underlay across the front of the board so what runs off it lands in the channel. Tiles disturbed are refixed to the pattern in BS 5534. Brackets, unions, outlets, hopper heads, downpipes and shoes are renewed as a set and hung to a real fall, and deepflow is worth considering where a long roof sheds more than a standard section will move. We follow the pipe down as well, because one discharging onto open ground rather than into a gully or a soakaway keeps the wall behind it damp and green at the base.

Air, and the repairs that stay repairs. Where a soffit is renewed, eaves ventilation goes in with it, through the panel or over the fascia, so an air gap stays open above the loft insulation and winter condensation is not put down to the tiles. Smaller faults stay small: a weeping joint, a bracket working loose of the wall, a length that has dropped out of fall, a snapped downpipe, an outlet choked with moss and debris. Those are refixed, re-hung or replaced singly, and wasps or nesting birds behind a board are dealt with before anything is shut up.

Height, and what sits underneath. A bungalow run comes off a tower. A two storey gable, or a run above a conservatory or a bay, needs scaffold built round it. The work at height rules are why access sits on a line of its own.

Cast iron or plastic. Old cast iron gutters and downpipes are heavy, and taking them down safely is slow work. Replacing them in cast iron or aluminium costs more than uPVC, and on a listed house or a frontage onto Main Road a match to the original may be expected.

The timber behind the boards. A soft fascia often means the rafter feet or the wall plate have been taking water too. That only shows once the board is off, so we list it as a possible extra and show you before doing it. We will not cap rotten boards in plastic, because that hides the rot rather than fixing it.

Salt and wind. On the seaward side of West Lulworth brackets and screws rust faster and the wind works at loose gutters. Stainless fixings, closer bracket spacing and a gutter set to a proper fall toward each outlet add a little, and save you a second call.

Put these to any other quote. Are the old boards coming off, or being covered? What are the fixings made of? Are all the downpipes and hoppers in the price, or only the fascia?

You are barely half a mile from the water, in a valley that opens straight at the weather. That changes what a gutter is actually being asked to do.

In a proper south westerly at West Lulworth the rain arrives at an angle, so driving rain hits the tiles hard and low, runs fast off the bottom course and jumps the front of the gutter, or is pushed back over the rear edge and down the wall behind it. A run that is clear and hung to a proper fall can still be losing water that way.

That is why we look at the back of the gutter and the tray behind it as carefully as the channel. It usually wants the felt support tray renewing so the underlay carries the water out over the board, sometimes a deeper section to hold what comes off the roof, and always fixings that will not rust out in salt air. On a West Lulworth house the seaward gable is where the paint goes first, so if the bargeboard on that side looks tired and the others do not, that is the weather rather than bad luck.

Boscombe is our base, 19.4 miles from here. We work across the village, East Lulworth, Wool, Winfrith and Wareham, broadly BH20, and the council for all of it is Dorset Council. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd is registered in England and Wales under company number 15471719. Before you book a visit in West Lulworth, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

The business belongs to Thomas Hannen, and Thomas is the one up the ladder looking at your fascias before he writes the price. On Checkatrade a verified customer scored us 10 out of 10. The visit to the house is free, and so is the written quote with every item on it.

Most repairs in West Lulworth 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.