Roof repairs in Ringwood

Ringwood, BH24

Find the wet spot, then follow it uphill

If water is dripping through a ceiling in Ringwood as you read this, ring 07435 839745 and say which room it is showing in.

A stain creeping across the sloping ceiling of a room in the roof, close to the dormer window. A concrete tile lying on the drive after a blow, with a dark gap in the roof you can see from the pavement. Or a flat roof over the garage or back extension that has started to drip where it meets the house wall.

Each has a cause in one place, and none means the whole roof is finished. Thomas gets up on the roof, goes into the loft and photographs the fault before a price is written. If your roof really has come to the end of its life, you are told so, with the pictures to show why.

Repairs, roof by roof

What goes wrong on Ringwood roofs and how each is put right

Ringwood has two kinds of roof. The old town, round the Market Place, High Street, West Street and Christchurch Road, is mostly clay plain tile with natural slate in among it, with chimneys, valleys and dormers. About a third of Ringwood's homes went up between 1945 and 1982, many of them out in Poulner, Crow and Hightown, and concrete interlocking tile is typical of houses from that period.

Clay plain tile in the old town. Each tile sits on its batten by two small nibs, and on an old roof many courses carry no nail at all. Once a nib snaps or frost flakes the face, the tile slides out and leaves a gap two tiles deep. We lift the tiles above, slot in a match and hold it with a hook or a nail where the course allows. Handmade clay varies in colour and camber, so the right tile may come from a reclamation yard.

Natural slate. Slate slips when its nail rusts through, and hangs by a corner or sits lower than its neighbours. One slate goes back on a lead tingle hooked under its tail. A dozen slipped on the same slope means the nails are failing everywhere, and that slope wants stripping and re-nailing, not a row of tingles.

Concrete interlocking tile on the post-war houses. The tile itself lasts well. But many roofs of this age were nailed only on some courses, so a strong wind can lift a tile held by its interlock alone and drop it in the gutter. We ease up the course above, slide in a matching profile and fix it with a tile clip. Some older profiles are no longer made, so we take one of yours to match.

Ridges, hips and verges. On houses from the 1950s to the 1990s these were bedded in sand and cement. The mortar shrinks and cracks, and crumbs of it turn up in the gutter before the tile moves. About one Ringwood home in eight is a bungalow, and a hipped bungalow has four hips as well as a ridge. Where only a few tiles are loose, we rebed them with a mechanical fixing through each, as BS 5534 expects. Where the whole run crumbles, a dry fix system to BS 8612 is the better repair. Gable verges get a clip-on dry verge, or new mortar over a sound undercloak. A ridge or a pair of hips is usually a day.

Box dormers. A flat-topped dormer added for a loft room leaks at its apron, the soakers down each cheek, or a split felt top. We fit new soakers, dress a new apron and renew the top in GRP or EPDM. Allow one to two days from a tower.

Chimneys and valleys. A leak beside a stack comes from the stepped flashing, the back gutter on the uphill side, or cracked flaunching letting rain into the brickwork. On an L-shaped older house the valley between two roofs silts up with leaves, and water climbs over the tile laps. Sometimes clearing it is the whole repair. A split lead valley means lifting the tiles either side and relaying it, so allow a day or two. More on chimney repairs.

Tile-hanging. The early twentieth-century houses on The Quomp and Woodstock Lane have clay tiles hung on their walls. A hung tile slips just as a roof tile does, and goes back the same way, with a matched tile and a nail or hook.

Flat roofs. Garages, back extensions, box dormers and the shared roofs over blocks of flats all have them. Felt splits at the upstand, GRP cracks at the trims, and EPDM lifts at the edges or round the outlet. A blister or split on a dry, firm deck is patched in a few hours. A deck that gives under foot means the covering has to come off. See flat roofing in Ringwood.

After a storm. Once the wind drops, look along the ridge and each gable from the garden. Lifted tiles or a loose verge are repairs, and a gap can be sheeted over until the permanent work is priced. If you are claiming on home insurance, ring the insurer first, and we give you dated photographs and an itemised quote to send them.

Repair or replace. When the felt under a concrete tile roof tears wherever it is touched, the battens are soft along the eaves and tiles are slipping on every slope, patching only chases the leak round the roof. That is whole-roof work for our roofers in Ringwood, and where it is close the quote prices both side by side.

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.

Repairing like for like needs no planning application, inside the Ringwood Conservation Area as much as outside it, as the Planning Portal guidance explains. New Forest District Council is the planning authority for the town, and it also handles consent for the 61 listed entries in and around Ringwood.

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 drip is in a room in the roof, tell us whether the wet is under the dormer window or in a corner of the sloping ceiling. 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

The old town

Old-town dormers and parapets: repair them as they are

Round the Market Place and along the High Street, the dormers are what you notice. New Forest District Council's Ringwood Conservation Area appraisal picks out repeating traditional dormers on the south side of the High Street near the Market Place, and triangular dormers in old tiled roofs at 80 to 84 Christchurch Road and near Fridays Cross.

A leak into a room behind one of these is usually at its edges: the lead apron under the window, the soakers where the cheek meets the slope, or the small lead top. The right repair is to renew that lead, refix the clay tile on the cheeks and keep the dormer's shape. Cladding the cheeks, boxing it in or flattening a triangular top may stop the leak, but it changes the street.

The appraisal also notes raised brick parapets at 5 and 7/9 Market Place. Behind a parapet there is usually a hidden gutter, and when its lead splits or its outlet silts up, the stain shows high on the top floor wall, not on the ceiling. The same appraisal accepts there is usually no control over a change of roofing material on an unlisted building, so repairing in kind is the better repair and its advice, not a legal duty. On a listed building, changing a dormer's character needs listed building consent first.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Ringwood

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

Builders in Ringwood: all our building work Everything we do in Ringwood Roof repairs, all areas Every area we cover