Insulation in Merley
Loft top-ups, rooms over garages, dormers and cavity walls across the Merley estates, measured before they are priced.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Most of the lofts in Merley have the same story in them: a single layer of quilt laid between the joists when the house went up, thinned by settling, squashed under boarding at one end and stopped short at the eaves at the other. It reads deeper than it measures. We put a probe in it on a free site visit and price the difference between what is there and what the ceiling needs.
The calls here come in three shapes. A bungalow that costs too much to heat and has a bedroom that never warms up. A room over the garage that is cold underfoot from October onward. And a house where the cavity was filled at some point in the past and nobody can say what with, or whether it is still up the wall.
All three want the same first step, which is a look rather than a quote over the phone. We measure the existing depth instead of guessing it, see whether it runs between the joists only, check whether the eaves are open or packed solid, find the tank, the pipe runs and the downlighters, and look at what is going on over the garage and in any dormer. The itemised written quote comes off that, method as well as figure, and nothing is ordered until you have said yes to it.
The work
The cold room over the garage is not a loft problem
Trussed lofts, and working round the webs. Seventy-seven per cent of Merley went up between 1945 and 1982, with half of it in the 1970s and early 1980s, so the roofs are almost all trussed. A truss is a braced triangle rather than an open loft: the webs cross the space at head height and the ceiling ties are shallow, which is why the original quilt so often stops where it got awkward and the hip ends come up short. We thread mineral wool between the joists all the way out, then run a second eco roll layer across the top at right angles, which is the only way to stop every ceiling tie acting as a line of cold bridge. A renovated ceiling is expected to reach a U-value of 0.16, and in mineral wool that is nearer 270mm than the 250 most people have in mind.
The room over the integral garage. This is the commonest cold room here and it has nothing to do with the loft. A garage under a bedroom is an unheated space with an insulated house sitting on top of it, and in a house of this age the floor between them was given very little. We insulate between and under the floor joists from inside the garage, rigid PIR board cut tight and the perimeter sealed rather than left with a gap all round, and we deal with the garage door head and the cold bridge where the floor crosses the outside wall.
A great many lofts on these roads were boarded straight down onto the ceiling ties in the years after the houses were built, and that layer is now compressed flat and doing a fraction of its job. We lift the boards, lay the full depth and set a raised deck back on legs above it. The cavity walls of this era are narrow ones and plenty were filled years ago, and blown fibre that has slumped leaves a cold band along the top of the elevation, which shows up as a stripe of mould on an upstairs wall. A borescope answers it in minutes: clear, full, or part filled and settled. Where a loft here has been converted into a room in roof the work moves to rafter level, with a clear air gap above and a multi-layer quilt such as TLX where a sloping ceiling has no depth to give. Houses of this vintage often carry a light tile hung panel under the window, and that panel is usually the thinnest part of the whole wall, so it is worth opening up while other work is going on. Where a fill is not the answer, an internal wall lining is the alternative, and external wall insulation would change the face of the house.
How it runs
From your call to a written price
The quote is itemised, with material, depth, ventilation and disposal on separate lines. Insulating a loft or lining a wall inside is permitted development, and Planning Portal guidance on insulation sets out where that stops. Building control comes in once a thermal element is renovated or the loft becomes a room. BCP Council is the authority for this address. There is no conservation area over Merley and the council keeps the list; the listed entries near here are on the Canford School estate rather than in the housing, and the council's listed building records will confirm an individual address. Insulation fitted in an existing home is zero rated for VAT under HMRC Notice 708/6.
Cost
What decides the price of an insulation job
No rate per square metre: the area is the easy part and everything round it is the awkward part. A bungalow with a big open ceiling and a hatch on the landing is one day; a detached with a hipped trussed roof closing down at the corners is another. Old material to bag and take away, and boarding to lift and put back, come before anything new goes down. Approved Document L sets what the work has to reach. Ask what depth is being laid, whether the old material comes out, and whether the eaves and hatch are included.
If it is urgent
Damp, condensation or a room you cannot heat
Ring rather than use the form. A loft dripping with condensation, mould that keeps coming back, or a room that will not hold heat gets seen quickly. The first visit settles whether that is insulation, ventilation or both, because insulating a space that cannot breathe makes it worse. Merley is close enough that a look is a matter of days. Outside Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm is by arrangement.
Worth knowing
The whole of Merley is the same age, and that cuts both ways
Merley did not grow slowly. Around half of everything here went up in the nineteen seventies and early eighties, and the great bulk of the rest is post-war, which means whole roads were built by the same hands, to the same drawing, within a season or two of each other. For insulation that is unusually helpful.
The loft you are standing under is very likely built the same way as the one next door: the same truss, the same shallow ceiling tie, the same eaves detail, the same cavity width and the same original layer of quilt. We generally know what we are going to find before the ladder goes up, and the survey is confirming it rather than discovering it.
The other edge of that is that the mistakes are shared too. If a run of houses had the cavity filled in one scheme by one crew, and that fill has settled, it has usually settled in all of them. If a road boarded its lofts in the same decade, the quilt underneath is crushed in the same decade. And a whole cohort of roofs reaches the same age at the same time, so eaves that were closed up when the soffits were replaced tend to have been closed up along the entire street.
Two practical things follow. Ask a neighbour what was found in theirs, because it is a better clue here than almost anywhere. But do not take a neighbour's price as yours, because what decides the cost is what has been done to your house since, and that is where these houses stopped being identical.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We cover Merley, Canford Magna, Bearwood, Broadstone and Corfe Mullen on BH21, out through Wimborne, Poole and Ferndown, and BCP Council is the planning and building control authority for this address. 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.
Questions
Merley questions we get asked
Why do so many lofts round here need the same thing?
Because the estate went up in one go. 77.0% of Merley was built between 1945 and 1982 and roughly half of it in the 1970s and early 1980s, so the lofts were done to the same standard within a few years of each other and they run out of performance together. What we usually find is flattened wool between the joists and bare boards over the top of it. The fix is depth over the joists and proper work at the eaves.
Half the houses here are detached. Does that change the survey?
It changes what we look at outside. Detached houses are 49.0% of the stock in Merley, and a detached house has four cold elevations rather than two, so the survey takes in the gable ends and the room over the garage as well as the roof space. We measure existing depth in several spots, lift a board at the eaves, and establish whether the cavity has ever been filled. Then the quote covers what is genuinely missing.
The room over the garage never warms up. What is wrong?
The floor of it, most likely, rather than the walls. A room built over an unheated garage sits on a joisted deck with cold air underneath, and on the Merley houses that deck was rarely insulated when it went in. Heat drops straight out of the floor into the garage below. We fit insulation between those joists from the garage ceiling, which avoids lifting the bedroom floor, and seal the perimeter where the deck meets the outside wall.
Is radon something we should be thinking about here?
Only where you are converting or extending, not for insulation. Merley falls in a band where an estimated 3 to 5 per cent of homes are affected, which puts basic radon protection into the design of new floors and new rooms rather than into a loft top-up. Wool over a ceiling does not seal a house or alter what comes up out of the ground. If the roof space becomes a room, the conversion drawings handle it.
Canford School is listed. Does that touch the houses near it?
No, listing applies building by building. Merley has 26 listed entries and they are things like Canford School and John Of Gaunt's Kitchen, not the postwar houses standing around them. Being near a listed building puts no control on your own roof space. There is no conservation area over Merley either, so unless your own address appears on the list, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council have no part in the job.
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Find out what your loft actually measures
A free site visit with a probe in the existing layer, and an itemised written quote that separates the depth, the ventilation and the disposal.