Roof repairs in Upton

Roof repairs in BH16

What has gone wrong up there, and what putting it right takes

If water is coming in right now, ring 07435 839745 and tell us which room it shows in and roughly when it started.

Perhaps a south-westerly blew through overnight and there is broken tile on the path under the hip. Perhaps the ridge on your late sixties semi has a gap you can see from the road. Or the felt over the back kitchen has a blister that has become a drip by the door.

Thomas comes out, goes up where it is safe to, looks at the underside from the loft hatch, and writes down which fault it is and what the repair involves.

The repairs

Slipped tiles, loose ridges and flat roof splits in Upton

Most of Upton was built in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those estates were roofed in concrete interlocking tile at a fairly shallow pitch, laid on bitumen felt with no boarding behind it, with the ridge, the hips and the verges bedded in sand and cement. About one home in four here is a bungalow.

Ridge and hip mortar coming away. After fifty years the bedding under the ridge and hip tiles shrinks and cracks, and a tile starts to rock when you press it. Smearing new mortar over the crack holds for a winter. The repair that lasts is to lift the loose run, clean the timber, and refit that section as a dry fix, each tile screwed or clipped down to BS 8612. A hip or a few metres of ridge is about a day.

Hips and valleys on L-shaped bungalows. Plenty of Upton bungalows are hipped and built on an L, which gives you several hip runs and a valley where the two wings join. The valley carries water off two slopes, and once it silts up with moss or its pointing cracks, water spills past the tile edge into the roof space. Clearing and repointing a valley can be a morning. Relaying it in new lead or a GRP trough means lifting the tiles along both sides, so allow two days on a long one, and one loft hatch on a bungalow shows you the whole void to trace it from.

Slipped, lifted and cracked tiles. A concrete tile slides or lifts once its nail or clip has rusted through, and on a shallow pitch wind-driven rain then runs up under it. The tiles themselves tend to outlast their fixings: BRE's testing of sixty year old roof tiles found them still sound. We slot in a matching tile and hold it with a new clip. If the profile is no longer made, we find a reclaimed match.

Chalet bungalow dormers. Chalet bungalows have flat-topped dormers set into the slope. Their felt tops split and blister, and the cheeks open up where they meet the main roof, so water turns up on a bedroom ceiling well away from the window. We re-cover the top and dress new lead soakers down the cheek joint.

Verges, old and newer. On the older semis the gable tiles sit on mortar over an undercloak, and it falls out in lumps. Houses built from the eighties onward mostly have factory dry verge units clipped to the tile ends instead. The early plastic caps go brittle in the sun, crack at the clip and drop into the garden one at a time in a gale. We rebed an old mortar verge with a fixing through each tile, or change it to dry verge. A broken plastic cap gets a matching replacement unit, never a lump of mortar.

Chimneys letting water in. If the stain is either side of a chimney breast, look at the stack before the tiles. The stepped flashing pulls out of its joint, a soaker splits, or the flaunching cracks. We re-dress or renew the lead and repoint the joints it tucks into. See chimney repairs.

Felt on garages, porches and back extensions. These blister, split along the upstand against the house wall and lose their drip edge. On a dry, firm deck a split or blister can be cut out and patched. If the deck gives underfoot, a patch will not hold and the roof wants re-covering in felt, GRP or EPDM: see flat roofing in Upton. Older garage roofs in cement sheet can contain asbestos, so nobody cuts or drills one here until it has been checked.

A gutter posing as a leak. A back gutter full of moss runs over behind the fascia, and indoors it looks exactly like a roof leak. Clearing it can be the whole repair. If the board behind it has gone soft, that is fascias, soffits and guttering in Upton.

The listed cottages. Three of Upton's four listed entries are thatched cottages on Marsh Lane and Dorchester Road, and their thatch is a job for a specialist thatcher, not us. The tiled and flat-roofed extensions behind them and the lead round their chimneys we can repair, though check first, since works affecting the character of a listed building need consent.

When it is time to stop repairing. Lift a few tiles and you see the felt and battens. If the felt is whole and the battens are firm, repair the fault and the roof has plenty left in it. If the felt breaks up in your fingers right across the slope and the nails have rusted away, every patch is money spent on a roof at the end of its life. Talk to our roofers in Upton about re-covering.

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 Upton, so putting back tiles, ridge or lead in the same materials needs no planning application. If your house is one of the four listed entries, ask Dorset Council about listed building consent before anyone starts, because a small repair to a listed building can still need it.

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 a bungalow, tell us which wing and which side of the hip the drip is under, because that points to a hip run or the valley before anyone climbs up. 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

Storm damage

When the wind comes in off Lytchett Bay

Upton's southern edge runs down to Lytchett Bay, a tidal arm of Poole Harbour, and roads like Shore Lane look south and west over open water. A south-westerly gale across the bay hits the verge, ridge end and hip that face it first. On a shallow concrete roof a tile only lifts once its clip or nail has already failed, so a tile pushed back onto the old fixing will lift again at the next blow. We give every disturbed tile a new mechanical fixing to BS 5534, and a mortar ridge or verge that has let go goes back as a dry-fixed section.

Before anyone climbs up, photograph the damage from the garden and note the date and the storm's name if it had one (how storms are named). If you claim, your insurer may ask whether there was a storm, whether the damage is the kind a storm does, and whether the storm was the main cause. Those are the three questions the Financial Ombudsman asks about a storm claim, and cracked old mortar or rusted nails will be treated as wear (the ombudsman on gradual damage). So our written quote puts gale damage and the wear found beside it on separate lines.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Upton

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

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