Roof repairs in Bransgore

Roof repairs in Bransgore

One fault, found and put right

If water is dripping through a ceiling now, ring 07435 839745 and tell us which room it is under.

On a roof like yours, the problem usually shows up in one of three ways. A hip tile has slid down a bungalow roof and is lying in the gutter. A brown tide mark keeps spreading across the ceiling of the back room, just inside the wall where the kitchen or garage roof joins the house. Or someone has told you the whole roof needs doing, and you want to know whether a repair will do.

Thomas comes out, goes up, puts his head in the loft and photographs the fault. You get a written list of what it needs and nothing it does not. If the honest answer is that a patch will not hold, that goes on the list too. The general method is on our roof repairs page.

The repairs

What goes wrong on a seventies Bransgore roof

About a quarter of the homes in Bransgore are bungalows, and much of the village was built in the 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of it detached. Both were usually covered in concrete interlocking tiles laid on bitumen felt, with the ridge, the hips and the verges held in sand and cement. That build fails in a known order, and each fault has its own repair.

Hips that creep. A bungalow roof is mostly hip, and every hip is a line of tiles held on by their mortar bedding and nothing else. The bed shrinks away from the tile, the tile starts to rock, and a gale lifts it or sends it down the hip. We lift the loose run, knock off the old bed and either rebed each tile with a screw and clip, as BS 5534 now expects, or fit a dry hip to BS 8612, which has no mortar in it to crack. If one tile rocks and its neighbours are tight, we fix that one and leave the rest alone.

Gable verges. The detached houses have gables, and the mortar under the end tiles washes out first on the south west facing end. You find the pieces on the path or the drive. A dry verge unit clips over each end tile and screws into the batten, so there is no bedding left to lose.

Slipped interlocking tiles. Tiles of this period were nailed on some courses and left to hold by their weight on the rest. When a nail rusts through or a batten end goes soft, the tile slides and opens its side lock. We lift the course above, fit a tile of the same profile and clip it down. A near match will not do, because a lock that only half engages lets wind drive rain through it.

Felt gone at the eaves. The felt that dips into the gutter perishes first, and water then runs behind the gutter into the fascia. Rule out a blocked gutter, then we lift the bottom courses and lap an eaves tray under the sound felt. If the board has gone soft, see fascias, soffits and guttering in Bransgore.

Valleys where the house turns a corner. On an L-shaped bungalow or detached house, a valley takes the water off two slopes at once. On roofs of this age it is mortar-pointed valley tiles, a lead lining or a GRP trough. The mortar cracks, lead splits at its laps and a trough silts up. Relining means lifting the tiles along both sides. The quote will say how long the work takes.

Where the extension meets the house. The join between a later roof and the original wall is often nothing more than a cement fillet. The two structures move a little differently, the fillet cracks, and the stain shows on the extension ceiling a hand's width inside the wall. We cut it out and fit lead soakers under the tiles with a step flashing chased into the brickwork.

Garage, dormer and rear extension flat roofs. Felt on these has mostly reached the end of its life. A split or a blister over a dry, firm deck can be cut out and patched. Look too at the outlet, where water ponds once the fall has sagged, and at the upstand against the wall. If the deck gives underfoot, water has been in it a while, and it wants stripping and re-covering to BS 6229. More on flat roofing in Bransgore.

Slate and plain tile on the older cottages. A slipped slate goes back on a copper tingle. A clay plain tile with a snapped nib is swapped for a matched reclaimed one. Where a house has a working stack, the flashing, the flaunching round the pots and the back gutter are where the water goes in, which is chimney repairs.

When a patch stops paying. If every tile you lift shows felt that crumbles, battens soft at the nail and nails rusted away across the slope, the next repair will not be the last. That is a re-roof, and it goes to our roofers in Bransgore. We will tell you which side of that line your roof is on.

How it runs

From your call to a written price

One person to ring from the first visit to the last. The quote is itemised, not a figure on the back of a card: access, where the fault is and what is being opened up to reach it, each tile, slate, ridge or flashing being renewed and what with, making good, and disposal on separate lines, so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.

Nothing is left open or unusable overnight. The site is swept at the end of each day rather than the end of the job, and what comes out leaves with us. If something turns up once we start that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on.

Bransgore has no conservation area and the village sits outside the National Park, so New Forest District Council is the planning authority, and a like for like repair needs no application, as the Planning Portal guidance on roofs explains. A listed house is the exception, covered further down.

If it is leaking now

Water coming through a ceiling

Ring rather than use the form. Put a bowl under the drip, keep anything electrical away from the wet patch, and if a ceiling is bulging keep everyone out from under it. The first visit is about finding where the water gets in and making the roof weathertight, and the permanent repair is priced in writing once the fault can be seen properly. From the garden, look at the hip, verge or wall joint nearest the stain. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For anything urgent, ring rather than use the form, and if we cannot pick up we ring you back as soon as we can.

Call now: 07435 839745

The old lanes

Cob, thatch and the roof built on the back

Nearly one home in five in Bransgore predates 1919. The oldest are cob cottages under thatch along Betsy Lane and Ringwood Road, with the thatched Three Tuns the one everybody knows. A thatched roof needs a specialist thatcher, and we do not work on thatch.

What we repair on these houses is everything built against it: a tiled lean-to or wing, a flat-roofed rear addition like the one recorded in Betsy Cottage's list entry, the lead where either of those meets the cob, and the brick stack.

Cob has to dry out through its face. A hard cement fillet or a cement patch at that junction holds water against the wall, and the cob behind it softens. So the repair is a proper lead detail finished with a lime-based pointing, never more cement, because the softer mortar lets the wall breathe. There are 13 listed entries in and around the village, and works affecting the character of a listed building need consent. If a repair would change a material or a detail on one of them, consent from New Forest District Council comes first, so we check the address before the price is written.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Bransgore

Nearby places we also cover for roof repairs, with straight-line distances from Bransgore, and the other trades we offer in Bransgore itself.

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