Roof repairs in Oakdale

Oakdale roof repairs

Put right the part that is letting the weather in

Water dripping through a ceiling as you read this? Ring 07435 839745 and say which room it is in and what the roof above it looks like from the garden.

Maybe a brown mark has spread across the lounge ceiling of your bungalow after a wet week. Maybe a chunk of sand and cement has dropped off the gable end onto the path, and the end tile above it now looks loose. Or the ceiling inside the front bay window has started to stain, while the main roof looks fine.

Each of those has a cause on the roof that can be found and pointed at. We look over the slopes from the ground, get up safely, then check the loft if there is one, and you get photographs of what is wrong with a written quote to put it right. When a roof is past saving, we tell you that plainly.

What we fix

Clay tile hips, concrete tile verges and the flat roof out the back

Oakdale was mostly built in the 1930s and in the decades after the war, so its roofs come in two main families that fail in different places.

Slipped clay plain tiles on 1930s roofs. A roof of that age was usually covered in small clay plain tiles, laid over bitumen or hessian felt or with no felt at all. As the nails rust, which roofers call nail sickness, and the little lug on the back of an old tile crumbles, tiles work loose and slide down the slope. One or two go back with a copper tingle or a tile clip. Where a whole strip of tiles is creeping, we lift that section and re-nail it into sound battens, which BS 5534 expects.

Hips on a hipped roof. A 1930s house or bungalow in Oakdale is usually hipped on all sides, so there is a long run of hip tile, and every piece of it sits in mortar. When the bedding cracks, a hip tile rocks, then the wind takes it. We rebed the run with a screw or clip through each tile, or strip the mortar and fit a dry hip system to BS 8612, which has no mortar left to crack. Check the hip iron at the bottom too, the steel strap that stops the lowest hip tile sliding off. If it has rusted through, we fit a new one while we are up. A bungalow's hips and ridge take about a day.

Concrete tiles that have gone tired. Many 1930s roofs have since been re-covered in concrete interlocking tile, and most post-war roofs had it from the start. Its face wears, it holds moss, and the moss clogs the gutters and valley outlets. Worn tiles can still keep the rain out, as BRE's testing of sixty year old roof tiles shows, so a single cracked one gets replaced with a tile of the same profile and the moss is cleared by hand.

Verges on the post-war gable ends. Where a post-war house or bungalow has a gable in place of a hip, the edge tiles along it sit on a strip of mortar. It cracks, falls out in lumps, and leaves the end tiles loose. We clear it and fit dry verge caps screwed into the ends of the battens. Both gables of a bungalow are about a day.

Shallow pitches. On a low slope, rain blown hard at the roof can creep up under a lap. A leak that only shows when rain comes from one direction points to a lap or a lock between tiles.

Valleys on L shaped bungalows. Where two wings of a bungalow meet, a valley carries the water from both slopes. A mortar valley cracks and a lead one splits or silts up with moss. We lift the tiles either side and renew the valley in lead or a GRP valley trough, which takes a day or two. We will not smear mastic over it.

Chimneys as the leak. A 1930s brick stack has a stepped lead flashing down its sides, a back gutter behind it and soakers under the tiles. Old lead lifts out of its joint, the back gutter fills with debris, and the pointing opens up. Any one of those can stain the ceiling beside the chimney breast. We re-dress or renew the lead and point the joints above it. If the stack is disused, it can be capped and ventilated so rain stops going down it. For work on the stack itself, see chimney repairs.

Bay window roofs. The front bays on the 1930s houses carry their own small roof of tile, lead or felt. The lead where it tucks into the wall above lifts, or the felt splits, and the bay ceiling shows it first.

Rotten felt at the eaves. On the older roofs the felt that ran into the gutter has perished. Water then drips behind the gutter onto the fascia. We lift the bottom courses, fit an eaves felt support tray, and lap new membrane over it. If the fascia behind has softened, that is fascias, soffits and guttering work, done on the same visit.

Felt over garages and extensions. These fail at blisters and splits, at the upstand against the wall and at the outlet. A split on a dry, firm deck is patched in a few hours. A deck that gives underfoot has soaked up water, and the answer then is a new covering in GRP or EPDM rubber, set out on our page for flat roofing in Oakdale.

Knowing when to stop. Whether it is tile or the odd slate roof, if tiles crack across a whole slope, the felt crumbles wherever one is lifted and the battens are soft, patching will not hold for long. That is a new covering, which is work for our roofers in Oakdale.

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 on an Oakdale house needs no planning application, and the Planning Portal guidance on roofs explains where that line sits. None of BCP's conservation areas takes in Oakdale. Heckford Park, the nearest, lies to the south and stops short of the suburb, and you can confirm any street on the council keeps the list. The one listed building in Oakdale is St George's Church, so for a house here listed building consent does not come into 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. On an Oakdale bungalow, tell us whether the wet ceiling is flat or slopes, because a sloping one means rooms in the roof and changes where we look 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

Bungalows

On a bungalow, the roof is right over your living room

About three in ten homes in Oakdale are bungalows, and a bungalow has no upstairs to soak up a leak. A small fault at a hip, a valley or the chimney shows up on the lounge or bedroom ceiling early, before the plasterboard has had much water. Fix the cause then, while the ceiling can still be dried and painted, and sort the whole hip and ridge in one visit with a dry fix system, not one tile after another each winter. The eaves on a bungalow are low, and it is tempting to lean a ladder up and have a look. Please do not climb onto the roof, as HSE guidance on ladders makes clear why a ladder is the wrong tool there. For our part, a low roof can usually be reached from a tower in place of a full scaffold.

If yours has rooms in the roof, with a dormer or rooflights, there is no open loft to follow the drip from. Water runs down behind the sloping ceiling and shows up well away from the hole. So the trace starts outside: the lead down the dormer cheeks, the flat top of the dormer, which is often felt and covered on our page for flat roofing in Oakdale, and the flashing kit around each rooflight.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Oakdale

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

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