Roof repairs in Corfe Mullen

Roof repairs

A hip tile on the drive, or a stain that grows in the rain

If water is coming through a ceiling in Corfe Mullen right now, ring 07435 839745 and tell us which room it is in.

Three things tend to make people pick up the phone. A hip tile has come down onto a bungalow drive after a blow. A brown mark on a back bedroom ceiling gets bigger every time the rain comes hard from one side. Or the felt over the garage holds a puddle for days and the wall inside has gone dark.

Thomas Hannen drives over from Boscombe and looks at your roof three ways: from the pavement, from a ladder at the eaves and from the loft with a torch. He photographs the fault, shows it to you there and then, and writes down what mending it involves. If the roof has gone past repairing, he tells you so and shows you why.

The repairs

Hips, valleys and flashings on Corfe Mullen's bungalows and estates

Most houses in Corfe Mullen went up between the end of the war and the early eighties, the biggest run of them in the seventies, and about a third are bungalows. Most sit under concrete interlocking tiles, with the ridge, hips and verges bedded in sand and cement. Roofs of that age fail in a handful of known places, and if yours is hipped or L-shaped, the hips and valleys are where to look first.

Hip tiles creeping down a bungalow. On a hipped bungalow the hips are the longest runs of bedded tiles on the roof, at the corners where the wind catches them first. The mortar cracks, the tiles loosen, and the bottom one is held only by a steel hip iron screwed to the hip rafter. Once that rusts through, the whole hip can slide. We lift the loose tiles, clear off the old bedding, fit a new hip iron and bed the tiles back with a screw or clip through every one, because BS 5534 wants ridge and hip tiles mechanically fixed and not held by mortar alone. A dry hip system is the other option, and ridges on two storey houses are mended the same way.

Gable verges losing their pointing. The mortar under the edge tiles weathers until you find sand on the sill below, and the undercloak behind it can perish too. We renew the undercloak and repoint, or fit dry verge units screwed to the batten ends, and the quote says which.

A bungalow that leaks only in driving rain. Interlocking tiles on a shallow bungalow pitch can let wind-driven rain creep back past the laps and side locks. Sound felt underneath carries it to the gutter; torn felt drops it on the ceiling. We lift the tiles over the wet patch, repair the underlay and check the pitch against what the tile was made for. If the pitch is too low for the tile, patching will not cure it, and we tell you.

A gap in the tile line seen from the garden. On a bungalow the slope is low enough to spot a slipped or cracked tile from the lawn. Its nail has usually rusted or its nib has snapped, so we slide in a matching tile and clip it. Some seventies profiles are out of production, and a match may then come off a hidden rear slope.

Felt rotted at the bungalow eaves. A single storey roof has eaves on every side, and the felt there perishes first, sending water onto the fascia and rafter feet. We lift the bottom courses, fit an eaves tray with new membrane dressed into the gutter and relay the tiles. A soft fascia or a gutter falling the wrong way gets its own line, and our page on fascias, soffits and guttering in Corfe Mullen covers that side.

Valleys on L-shaped bungalows and dormers. A valley takes the water off two slopes. On roofs of this age it may be a mortar-pointed concrete trough, lead or a GRP liner, and each cracks or splits in time. We lift the tiles either side and relay it in lead or GRP. Sealant smeared into a split lets go within a winter.

Chimneys and abutments. A stack that no longer serves a fire can still let in water through split lead, a cracked cement fillet or broken flaunching. We renew the lead in code rated sheet and re-flaunch, or cap and vent a redundant stack. Where a porch, garage or extension meets a wall or a pitched roof, the soakers and step flashing are checked the same way. The stack itself is covered on our chimney repairs page.

Felt roofs over garages and extensions. Blisters and splits at the upstand or outlet can be patched while the deck beneath is dry and firm. If the boards give underfoot, a patch will not bond and the answer is a new covering in GRP or EPDM. Our page on flat roofing in Corfe Mullen goes into that.

When a repair stops being the answer. On these roofs most leaks trace back to an edge, a junction or a flashing, and a targeted repair suits them. If the battens and felt have gone across whole slopes and the tiles have turned porous, patching just moves the leak. That is a whole-roof job, priced side by side with the repair, and our page for roofers in Corfe Mullen covers it.

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.

Putting back a matching tile, ridge or flashing needs no planning application, and Planning Portal guidance sets out where that line sits. Inside Corfe Mullen parish the planning authority is Dorset Council, not BCP, whether the address is BH21 or BH18; near the Broadstone edge, go by the parish, not the postcode. Inside the Brogg Street / Sleight Lane Conservation Area, or on a listed cottage, the rules tighten, and the section below explains how that changes a repair.

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. Note which slope the drip is under and which way the wind was blowing, because on a low hipped roof that narrows the search to one hip, one valley or one flashing. Stay off the roof and off the ladder yourself. 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

Worth knowing

Mending an old clay or slate roof near Sleight Lane

The older north end of the village, near the Stour around Sleight Lane and Brogg Street, just north of Pardys Hill, falls inside the Brogg Street / Sleight Lane Conservation Area. Check the exact boundary on Dorset Council's map, because houses a few doors apart can sit either side of it. Its roofs are mostly plain clay tile and natural slate, with some thatch, and there are listed cottages and houses inside it. The fault may match one on an estate bungalow, a loose ridge or a slipped tile, but the right repair is different.

A plastic dry ridge and clip-on verges suit a seventies concrete roof and would change the look of an old clay one. Here the like-for-like repair is a matched clay ridge bedded back in mortar with a screw or clip through each tile, which meets the mechanical fixing requirement in BS 5534 and leaves the roofline as it was. A slipped slate goes back on a tingle or a hook, and a cracked plain tile is replaced with a matched clay tile, often reclaimed, never a concrete one. Finding the match is part of the price.

If your house is listed, even a repair that changes a detail, such as a dry system in place of mortar bedding, can need listed building consent from Dorset Council, so check before anyone touches it and we work to what is agreed. A thatched roof here needs a specialist thatcher, because we do not thatch. What we can repair beside one is a brick stack or a tiled outbuilding.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Corfe Mullen

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

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