Roof repairs in Highcliffe

Roof repairs

One fault, found and put right

If water is already coming through a ceiling, ring 07435 839745 and say which room it is in and which side of the house faces the weather.

A hip tile has crept towards the gutter, with mortar crumbs on the path below. A brown tide mark has appeared along the edge of a bedroom ceiling, tight against the outside wall. Or you live in a top-floor flat, the ceiling is wet, and you are not sure the roof is yours to mend.

We look from the road and garden, go up a roof ladder where safe, and check the underside from the loft hatch. You get photographs and a written note of what has failed.

The repairs

Bungalow hips, eaves felt and the seaward slope

Most Highcliffe roofs went on in the decades after the war: hipped and gabled bungalows and two storey houses under concrete interlocking tile, with the ridge, hips and verges set in mortar and bitumen felt laid underneath. More than a quarter of the homes here are bungalows.

Hip tiles walking downhill. Each hip on a bungalow runs down to a corner of the eaves on a bed of mortar. Once that cracks, the hip tiles creep, held only by the hip iron, a small bent bracket at the foot. On a roof this age the iron can have rusted to a stub or never been fitted. We lift the run, fit a stainless hip iron, then rebed each tile with a screw through it or fit a dry hip system to BS 8612. Hips and a ridge on a bungalow are about a day.

Verges on the gable ends. On a gable the mortar under the end tiles drops out in lumps, and the gable facing south west, into the rain off the sea, goes first. A dry verge unit screwed over each end tile has no mortar to lose, and a pair of gables is a day.

Tiles slipping one at a time. A concrete tile that slides out of line with no crack in it has lost its fixing. Highcliffe sits on the cliff top, so salt rusts steel nails and clips on the south west slope first. We lift the courses above, fit the tile back with a stainless or aluminium nail and a clip as BS 5534 expects, and re-fix the tiles around it too, since their fixings are the same age. Re-fixing a handful from a roof ladder takes a morning.

Felt torn at the eaves. The bitumen felt under these roofs goes brittle where it laps over the fascia into the gutter, then tears and sags. Rain then drops behind the gutter onto the fascia and wall plate, which is why the stain sits along the edge of a room. We lift the bottom courses, cut the torn felt back, and fit an eaves support tray lapped with new membrane. If the fascia has gone soft, that is fascias, soffits and guttering on the same visit. On a house of this era the soffit boards or the undercloak at the verge can be asbestos cement, so we check them before anything is cut or snapped off.

Chimney stacks and valleys. If your bungalow kept its chimney, or has an L-shaped plan with a valley where two roofs meet, those are two more places to look. The old cement fillet down the side of the stack cracks and lets water in behind it, and a mortar-bedded valley opens up. We cut the fillet out for lead soakers and a stepped flashing, and relay a valley on new lead or a GRP trough. A flashing set is a day, a valley one to two. Loose flaunching or open joints in the stack itself are chimney repairs.

Felt flat roofs. Garages, porches, dormers and extensions from those years are mostly felt, which blisters, splits at the upstand and ponds at the outlet. A split over a dry, firm deck is a patch of a few hours. A deck that gives underfoot has soaked up water and a patch will not bond to it, so it wants re-covering to BS 6229. More on flat roofing in Highcliffe.

Communal roofs over flats. Nearly four in ten homes in Highcliffe are flats. A leak into a top-floor flat usually starts at a blocked or split outlet, a parapet upstand or a valley, and the repair is the same work as on a house. Who may book it is below.

The older cottages. A few older houses carry clay plain tile or slate. A cracked one is swapped for a reclaimed match, held with a tingle where it cannot be nailed. Thatch is another trade: we do not thatch, so it needs a specialist thatcher.

Repair or re-roof. Sound tiles with failed hips, verges and eaves is a repair. Felt that crumbles wherever a tile is lifted, and battens soft across the slope, mean the next leak is only a matter of where. That is a re-roof, it is priced as one, and it is work for our roofers in Highcliffe.

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.

Mending a roof like for like needs no planning application, and the Planning Portal guidance explains where that stops. The parish does have two conservation areas, Bramble Lane and Verno Lane, and there are 18 listed buildings in and around Highcliffe. If your home is in either area or on the list, speak to BCP Council before any material is changed; for the conservation area boundaries, the council keeps the list.

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 a south westerly has lifted a ridge or stripped tiles off the seaward slope, photograph what has landed in the garden, keep people clear of that elevation, and see emergency roof repairs for how a temporary sheet goes over the gap. 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

Flats

Water through a top-floor flat ceiling

If you own a flat, read the lease first. Most leave the roof, gutters and outside walls with whoever owns the building, with repairs arranged by a managing agent or a residents' management company. Report the leak to them by email, with dated photos of the ceiling, so nobody can later claim they had no idea.

Tenants of a flat or house report it to the landlord, who must keep the structure and exterior in repair on a short tenancy under section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985. On the agent's say-so we find the fault, make the roof weathertight and photograph it. The permanent repair is quoted to the agent or residents' company, who instruct and pay, and a small one can go straight ahead. Where the work would cost any one leaseholder more than a set amount, every leaseholder has to be consulted first under section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, with the threshold set in the consultation regulations. That has fixed notice periods, so a sound temporary repair and a written fault report keep your ceiling dry meanwhile.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Highcliffe

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

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