Insulation in Spetisbury
Loft top-ups that keep your storage, floors done from below, and breathable linings where a solid wall genuinely needs one.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
The right first job in Spetisbury depends entirely on which sort of house you have. On the old cottages it is usually the floor and the draughts before the walls. On the post-war houses it is the cavity and then the loft. We come and look for free and tell you which, in writing.
The calls come in for much the same handful of reasons. A cottage that eats heat and still has a cold corner in every room. A landing that is freezing while the room below it is fine. A loft full of boxes with a grey, flattened layer somewhere underneath them. Or a floor you can feel the cold coming up through in socks.
Adding more material on top of what is there rarely deals with any of that. The visit is a proper look instead: the real depth of what is in the loft once it is lifted, whether the eaves are still open, whether the walls have a cavity in them at all, what is under the ground floor, and where the tank, the pipe runs and the ceiling penetrations sit.
The written itemised quote follows from what we find, and it says what depth is going in and what is happening to the ventilation as well as what it costs.
The work
You cannot roll a cut roof end to end
Lofts that are also the storage. Half the lofts we open here have a floor of chipboard over the joists and the family's belongings on top. Underneath, the old quilt is compressed to nothing where anybody has walked and has settled into the gaps everywhere else, so it measures a third of what it was meant to be. A renovated ceiling is expected to reach a U-value of 0.16, nearer 270mm of quilt than the 250 people remember. The fix is a raised deck on legs: the boarding goes back at a height that lets full depth mineral wool run underneath it, an eco roll between and over the joists, and you keep the storage instead of choosing between the two.
Purlins and struts. Half the houses here went up between 1945 and 1982, and those mostly have a cut roof rather than a trussed one, with purlins and struts coming down onto the ceiling joists and a tank sitting in the middle of it. You cannot roll a loft like that from one end to the other. Every strut, every tank stand and every run of pipework is an edge that has to be cut round and closed up properly, and those edges are where the heat loss in a half done loft always turns out to be.
A fifth of the village predates 1919, and in those cottages the ground floor is often boards on joists over a ventilated void. Insulating between those joists, held on netting with the airbricks left clear so the void still breathes, makes more difference to how a room feels than anything you could do to the walls of the same house. Brick, flint and cob walls have no cavity to fill and stay sound by drying through their faces, so internal wall insulation on one has to be vapour open, a wood fibre or mineral board finished in lime. Anything built here from the sixties on does have a cavity, and that gets checked with a borescope rather than assumed. Where a roof space here has become a room in roof it is rigid board rather than roll, PIR between the rafters with a clear air gap above and a multi-layer quilt such as TLX under a sloping ceiling with no depth to give.
How it runs
From your call to a written price
Insulating a loft or lining a wall on the inside counts as an improvement rather than development, so it needs no planning permission and sits inside permitted development. The Planning Portal sets out where that stops. Building control is engaged once a thermal element is renovated or the loft becomes a room, and the Building Regulations set the standard the finished work has to reach. The village has no conservation area of its own, but there are eighteen listed entries in and around it, and on a listed building listed building consent reaches inside as well as out, which catches an internal lining as much as anything on the outside face. Dorset Council holds the records.
Cost
What decides the price of an insulation job
No rate per square metre. A thatched cottage with a hatch the size of a tea tray, a fifties semi with a part boarded loft full of boxes, and a bungalow with a hip end closing the space down at both ends are three different days before a roll is opened. Old material that has to be bagged and taken away is a cost before anything new goes down, and so is everything stored up there. Approved Document L sets what the finished work has to reach. Ask any quote what depth is going down and whether the hatch and pipework are in.
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 looked at quickly. Spetisbury is a straight run up the A350 from us, so you get an honest day rather than a promised hour we would miss, and if the loft is running wet we will tell you what to open up in the meantime.
Worth knowing
Two sorts of house, two different first moves
The village is really two kinds of building sitting next to each other. There is the older stock along the street, solid walled, low eaved and put up long before anybody thought about heat at all. And there is everything added since the war, most of it from the late sixties and early seventies, built with a cavity and a shallow layer in the loft that was normal at the time.
Telling which one you are in is not difficult. Measure a window reveal: a solid wall gives you roughly the depth of a brick and a bit, a cavity wall gives you noticeably more, and a hollow sounding wall upstairs usually means a lining rather than masonry.
It matters because the cheap wins are in completely different places. In the newer houses the order is nearly always the cavity, then the loft up to full depth, then the hatch and the draughts, and the whole lot is inexpensive relative to what it saves off the bill.
In the older ones the walls are the last thing to touch and the most expensive, so the money goes into the roof space, the ground floor and the openings first, and only then do you look at whether a breathable internal lining is worth it in the rooms you actually sit in. Somebody quoting you a cavity fill on a cob cottage, or a wall lining before the loft has been measured, has not looked at the house.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We cover Spetisbury, Charlton Marshall, Blandford Forum, Bryanston and the Winterbornes on DT11 and down the Stour valley towards Wimborne, and Dorset 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
Spetisbury questions we get asked
Our semi dates from about 1970. Where is the heat going?
Through the ceiling and up the party cavity, in that order. Spetisbury is 50.5% post war stock and 34.8% of it belongs to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when semis went up with an open cavity between the pair and a thin loft layer above. Semis are 28.8% of the village. That party cavity behaves like a chimney if it is open at the top, so the head gets sealed.
The old cottages at the far end. Same approach?
No, different rules apply to them. About 20.1% of Spetisbury predates 1919 and those walls are solid, so they have to stay able to dry outwards. Cement render and vapour tight linings trap water in the masonry and push the damp through to the inside face. The roof space is still the first place to spend, because it behaves the same whatever the walls are made of.
The worst wind hits the east side. Does that change anything?
It changes where we seal rather than what we lay. In Spetisbury the most exposed face looks east north east, so that side carries the driven rain and the wind pressure. Air gets pushed in at the reveals and along the eaves on that face and drawn back out on the sheltered side. Sealing the pressured elevation first stops the flow that is carrying heat out of the rooms behind it.
Is planning likely to be involved at all?
Rarely. There is no conservation area covering Spetisbury and 18 listed entries in the parish, Cedar Court among them, so most houses have nothing to clear before starting. Dorset Council only becomes interested if you alter the outside or make the roof space habitable. If yours is one of the listed ones then internal work counts too, and I check the entry before quoting rather than after.
Why was our quote different from the one next door?
Because the two lofts are not the same, even in a matching pair. One has a boarded storage deck that has to come up and go back, the other has bare joists. One has downlights punching through the ceiling that need covers over them, the other has none. Access, hatch size, tank position and how far the eaves can be reached all move the figure, and each is listed separately.
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Start with a look in the loft
A free site visit in Spetisbury, a rule put in whatever is up there already, and a written itemised quote with the method on it as well as the number.