Fascia, soffit and guttering replacement in West Parley

Working out what has gone. The fascia is the board every gutter bracket screws into, so it decides the size of the job. Blown paint, a dark stripe under the gutter line and a board that takes a screwdriver mean the run is coming down.

If the fascia is sound, the fault is something smaller and much cheaper: a length sagging between brackets, a leaking joint at a union, a downpipe off its clips, a broken shoe, an outlet blocked with moss off the tiles, or a run that has tipped back towards the wall so it overflows behind rather than over the front.

Boards off. With the gutter down and the fascia and soffit away, the rafter feet, the wall plate and the bottom edge of the underlay are all in view, and that is when the job is priced honestly. Rot in a rafter end normally stops within a few inches and gets cut back and spliced. A felt support tray carries the underlay drip out over the gutter, clear of the board, and a tilt fillet lifts the bottom course of tiles to the angle they should sit at. Capping plastic over rotten timber hides every one of those checks. Over dry, sound timber it is a genuine option and a cheaper one, and we will say which you have.

The new run. uPVC fascia and vented soffit, bargeboards and capping to any gable, and a gutter picked for the roof, not the catalogue. Half round suits most runs, ogee gives a squarer face, and deepflow is the one that matters where a wide slope drains into one length, because a standard section will spill in heavy rain even spotlessly clean. Timber can go back in timber, cast iron on an older building is often worth re-bedding and repainting, and aluminium suits a long run. Brackets go back at proper spacing and the run is set to a fall, because level looks right from the drive and holds standing water for the rest of its life.

Where the water goes. Every outlet, union, hopper, downpipe clip and shoe is renewed or refixed, and we follow the rainwater to the bottom. On a low West Parley eaves the downpipe often discharges close to the wall, into a gully or a soakaway, and a gully full of silt or a soakaway that has stopped taking water keeps the brickwork damp however good the new gutter is.

Air, birds and moss. New soffits get vents, or an over fascia vent strip where the board is too narrow, so there is a continuous air gap through the eaves into the loft. Without it, warm damp air from the house sits against a cold roof and condenses on the felt. Birds behind a lifted soffit and wasps in a gable end are both common on low West Parley roofs, and both get dealt with before new boards go on.

A hipped West Parley bungalow has fascia, soffit and gutter on all four sides, so there is more roofline per room here than on most houses. Thomas walks every run, pushes a screwdriver into the old boards where they look soft, and notes where each downpipe goes into the ground.

Your written quote splits out access, the length of each run, taking off the old boards and gutter, the new fascia, soffit and any bargeboard on a gable end, the gutter, outlets and downpipes, and taking the waste away.

The old boards come down and the new ones go up, all on one quote. On a single storey run we work from a tower or low staging, which sits easily on the open drives and lawns in West Parley; a two storey gable gets a scaffold. Each run is closed up and the gutter reconnected before we stop for the day, so rain still has somewhere to go. Old timber and plastic leave with us and the ground is swept. If the rafter ends are rotten once a board is off, we photograph them and price them before touching them.

Renewing boards and rainwater goods like for like is repair, so no planning application and nothing for building control. Outside the little conservation area around the old church, colour and profile are your choice. Dorset Council would want listed building consent before the roofline came off any of the four listed entries.

A gutter pulled off its brackets, a downpipe snapped at the shoe, or a fascia soft enough to push a finger through gets worse in the next heavy rain, because the water runs down the wall and soaks the brickwork.

If a length is hanging over the drive or a path, keep people and cars clear of it. Use the phone for this one. The first visit gets the run propped or taken down safely and the water discharging away from the wall. Thomas then prices the proper repair once he can see how far the rot goes. Normal jobs run Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. If you ring and it goes unanswered, we get back to you as soon as we can.

Call now: 07435 839745

More than a third of the homes in West Parley are bungalows, and that changes the shape of a roofline job in ways the square footage of the house never suggests.

Put the same floor area on one storey and you roughly double the roof, which means far more perimeter: more metres of fascia and soffit, more gutter, and on a hipped bungalow a run that goes all the way round with no gable to stop at. So the quote is longer than for a two storey house of the same size, and that is not a mistake.

It cuts the other way on access. Most of a bungalow can be reached from a tower rather than a full scaffold, which takes a real cost out of the job and is why the platform is a separate line on the quote. A low roof has its own drawbacks too. Overhanging trees and shrubs reach the gutter easily in West Parley, so moss and leaf debris pack the outlets faster than they do at two storeys. And the loft comes down to a shallow point at the eaves, so there is very little room for air to get past the insulation. That makes the ventilation detail in a new soffit worth more on a bungalow than almost anywhere else.

Nearby places we also cover for fascias, soffits and guttering, with straight-line distances from West Parley, and the other trades we offer in West Parley itself.

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