Roof repairs in Moordown

Roof repairs in BH9

Mend the part that has failed and leave the rest alone

If rain is already coming into your Moordown home, ring 07435 839745 and tell us which ceiling it is showing on.

Any of these is reason enough to ring. A hip tile hanging out of line at the corner of a bungalow after a blustery night. A damp patch on the front bedroom chimney breast that only shows in heavy rain. Orange tile chips and grey mortar in the gutter. Water dripping off the bay roof onto the front step.

None of those means the roof is finished. Thomas looks from outside and from the loft, photographs the fault, and prices fixing that fault and nothing else.

The repairs

Fixing a century-old tiled roof, one fault at a time

Moordown was mostly built between the wars, on the Mayfield Park Estate laid out just before the First World War and filled in through the 1920s and 30s. Most roofs here are hipped, tiled and close to a hundred years old, many still on the nails and mortar they went up with.

Clay plain tiles. The small flat tile on an inter-war house hangs on two nibs and is nailed every few courses. It fails by a snapped nib, a face flaked away by frost, or moss packed into the laps so water wicks up behind. We ease the tiles above apart, slide the broken one out and fit a replacement of the same size and camber on a tile hook. Weathered clay rarely matches new, so a reclaimed tile is usually the better choice.

Concrete tiles. Early concrete plain tiles turn up on some houses, and the post-war infill mostly carries concrete interlocking tiles. Concrete wears until the sand shows, and cracks where someone knelt on it to fit an aerial or a dish. Interlocking profiles only lock with their own pattern, so the job starts with finding the right one. If yours is natural slate, the fault is the same rusted nail, and a slipped slate goes back on a lead tingle.

Hips and ridges. Plain tile hips are bonnet or half round tiles set in mortar, and on a bungalow you can watch them loosen from the garden. Once the bedding cracks the tile rocks, then the wind takes it. We lift the loose run, clean off the old mortar and rebed it with a mechanical fixing, or fit a dry hip system, as BS 5534 expects.

Valleys, and why the stain moves. Where two hips meet, or a bay roof joins the main slope, there is a valley lined in lead or laid with valley tiles. Water under a split valley runs down the valley rafter and drops at the bottom, so a stain in the corner of a room points uphill to the valley, not to the tile above it. We clear the leaves, lift the tiles either side and reline it in new lead.

Chimneys. On a stack this age the join may be a cement fillet in place of lead, shrinking off the brick, or the soakers have split and the flaunching round the pots has opened. The fix is new soakers and step flashing, fresh flaunching and a sound pot. A stack shared with next door needs your neighbour's say, with two months notice for work to a party structure. More on chimney repairs.

The bay and its apron. The little roof over a front bay meets the wall just under the bedroom sill, and the lead apron along that join lifts or cracks so rain runs behind it into the bay head. We dress in a new apron and repoint the joint above it.

Felt on the back extension. Rear kitchens, garages and porches carry felt that blisters, splits and peels off the wall at the upstand. If the deck is firm we patch it. If it is soft it needs a new roof: see flat roofing in Moordown, and for gutters and a rotten fascia, fascias, soffits and guttering in Moordown.

After a gale. Expect plain tiles stripped off a hip, a ridge end gone from a bungalow or a verge opened up. We make it weathertight first, sheeted if the full repair needs a dry day. Photograph it for your insurer, because the three questions the Financial Ombudsman asks about a storm claim include whether the roof was sound beforehand. See emergency roof repairs.

Repair or re-roof. A fault in one place is a repair. When it is everywhere, a re-roof is on our roofers in Moordown page, and the section below covers the ground in between.

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.

No conservation area covers Moordown (the council keeps the list) and there is no Article 4 direction here, so a like-for-like repair to a house is plain maintenance with no application to BCP Council. Some buildings in Moordown are listed, and on those works affecting the character of a listed building need consent. One of them, Moorside Cottage on McWilliam Road, is thatched, and a thatched roof needs a specialist thatcher, which we are not.

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 wet is showing in the corner of an upstairs room, say so when you ring, because on a hipped Moordown roof that points us to a hip or the foot of a valley first. 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

Repair or replace

Several slipped tiles on one slope usually means the nails have gone

One slipped tile after a gale is a small job: a matched tile and a hook. The warning sign is slipped tiles scattered across one slope, or tiles that come away in the hand once one is lifted. With 62.3% of Moordown's homes built between the wars, plenty of roofs still hang on their original iron nails, and when those rust through along a slope (nail sickness), fixing one tile a visit never catches up. Are the slipped tiles all on one face of the roof? Send us close photographs showing whether the nibs have snapped or the nail has rusted away.

The middle way is to strip that one slope, set the sound tiles aside, fit membrane and new battens, and relay your old tiles with matched reclaimed ones filling the gaps, leaving the other slopes alone. Old clay plain tiles can be sound enough to go back on, as BRE's testing of sixty year old roof tiles found. One slope of a hipped house is normally well under half the roof, so the insulation rules in Approved Document L for larger renewals would not normally apply, and the quote says which.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Moordown

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

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