Roof repairs in Christchurch

Roof repairs in BH23

Trace the leak, mend that part

If water is coming in now, ring 07435 839745 and tell us which room and which floor it shows on.

Perhaps a grey slate has landed in the yard behind a terrace, leaving a pale gap on the slope. Perhaps a damp patch is spreading on the ceiling of a top-floor room in a building whose roof you cannot even see from the pavement. Or the felt over the kitchen extension of a newer house has blistered, and there is a drip where it meets the wall.

We look from the ground, go up where it is safe, and check the loft or roof void from inside. You see photographs of the fault, then a written quote. If patching would be money wasted, we say so and show you why.

The repairs

Slate, handmade clay and the lead in between

The old town between the Priory and the bridges is Welsh slate and handmade red clay plain tile, often steep, with lead gutters, parapets and plenty of chimneys. About a fifth of homes in the town were built before 1919. Around that core, many houses and blocks of flats went up from the 1980s on, mostly under concrete interlocking tile.

Slate that has slid. Slate in the old town and on the Victorian and Edwardian houses of Barrack Road was hung on iron nails, which rust through at the head after a century. A few slipped slates go back on tingles, strips of lead or copper hooked over the batten and folded up under the bottom edge. When slates have moved on every course, that is nail sickness: the slope is stripped, the sound slates kept and re-hung on copper nails. A cracked slate is replaced in Welsh slate of matching size and colour, because fibre cement stands out beside it the day it goes on.

Handmade clay plain tiles. The older roofs near the Priory and along Bridge Street hang handmade clay tiles on nibs, some on pegs. A nib snaps, a peg rots or frost flakes the face. A machine-made tile is flatter and more even in colour, so we look for reclaimed handmade tiles to match. A handful of tiles is a morning once access is up.

Purbeck stone at the eaves. Some of those clay roofs finish at the bottom edge with Purbeck stone slips, as on several Bridge Street houses and at Place Mill. The stone outlasts its fixings. We lift the slips, clean them and reset them on new fixings, and we will not suggest swapping them for a row of tiles.

Chimneys. Church Street keeps a good number of its original stacks and pots, and on any old house here the chimney is a prime suspect. Flaunching cracks, joints open, and the stepped flashing, soakers and back gutter work loose. Fresh lead does little if water is soaking through a porous stack, so we look at both. See chimney repairs.

Lead gutters and valleys. Behind a parapet, between two roofs and at the back of a stack, a split in the lead or a choked outlet sends water into the top floor. There is more on that further down.

Concrete tile on the newer houses. On the 1980s and later roofs the tiles usually have life left, and the faults are at the edges: cracked mortar bedding under ridge and hip tiles, verge mortar dropping out at the gable, and bitumen felt perished where it laps into the gutter. We rebed a ridge with a mechanical fixing or fit a dry ridge, fit dry verge units to BS 8612, and clip slipped tiles the way BS 5534 now expects. A ridge run is about a day.

Wind off the harbour. Weather crossing the harbour gets under a loose verge or ridge tile on the south-west side and drives rain into abutments. A leak that shows only in a south-westerly points to that side. After a storm we can sheet a damaged slope as a temporary cover, and the dated photographs are there for your own insurance claim.

Flat roofs. Felt, GRP or EPDM on extensions, garages, dormers and some flat blocks splits, blisters and lets go at the upstand and the outlet. We patch a split in an afternoon when the boards beneath are sound and dry. If they are spongy, no patch will bond. More on flat roofing in Christchurch.

When it is the gutter. A cast iron hopper packed with leaves, or a gutter pulling off a soft fascia, can put water down a wall and into a room, and clearing it may be the whole job. Our fascias, soffits and guttering page covers the rest.

Thatch. 3 Whitehall and the New Forest Perfumery on Castle Street are thatched. We do not thatch, so a thatched roof needs a specialist thatcher.

When a repair stops making sense. Slates slipping all over, felt tearing wherever a tile is lifted, or battens soft enough to push a screwdriver into mean the next patch will not be the last. A whole new covering is a job for our roofers in Christchurch.

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.

A like-for-like repair, slate for slate and lead for lead, does not usually need a planning application, as the Planning Portal guidance on roofs explains. Christchurch has several conservation areas, set out in the council's list of conservation areas, so check before any covering is changed. The old town has well over a hundred listed entries, the Priory and the Red House Museum among them, and a listed roof can need consent even for a repair, so look it up in the council's listed building records first.

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. If the water is showing in a top-floor room of an old town building and you cannot see the roof from the street, say so when you ring, because the gutter behind the parapet is the first place we check. 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

Old town roofs

Leaks behind a parapet, in the gutter you cannot see

The council's appraisal for the Christchurch Central conservation area, one of the areas in the council's list of conservation areas, notes that many High Street roofs are hidden from ground level by parapets. On Castle Street the roof is often out of sight behind a parapet or simply because of the height of the building. Where you can see them, they are mostly Welsh slate. Behind each parapet, a lead-lined gutter gathers everything off the slope and empties through one outlet into a hopper. So when a leak shows in a top-floor room or on the upper wall of a building on the High Street, Castle Street or Church Street, that gutter is where we start, before any slate is touched.

You cannot inspect it from the pavement. We reach it through a roof hatch where there is one, or from a tower or scaffold, clear the outlet and hopper, and check each lead bay and the step between bays. Split lead in a hidden gutter is often covered with mastic or a felt overlay, which holds water against the lead and fails. The lasting repair is new lead laid in short bays with proper steps, so it can move with the heat. Access and who owns the roof set the price and the timing, and where there are flats over a shop the freeholder instructs the work.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Christchurch

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

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