Roof repairs in Walhampton and Portmore

Roof repairs

A leak, a loose ridge or a slate on the path

If water is coming through a ceiling in your house right now, ring 07435 839745 and tell us which room and which side of the house it is on.

Perhaps a piece of decorative ridge has dropped into the garden after a wet gale off the river. A slate has slid down the long back slope and sits caught in the gutter. A brown tide mark has appeared on the wall beside the chimney breast in an upstairs bedroom.

We look from the road and the garden first, then go up on a roof ladder where it is safe to, and check the underside of the roof from the loft with a torch. You get photographs of the fault, a plain explanation of what caused it, and a quote to put that one thing right.

What we mend

Slates, clay tiles and stacks: the repairs these roofs need

Two kinds of roof make up most of the older houses here. Portmore's two storey brick cottages round the green carry natural slate with decorative ridges. In Walhampton, the older brick houses and the Arts and Crafts houses along Undershore Road carry plain clay tile, with some slate between them. Post-war and later houses and bungalows, and the newer infill, are mostly concrete interlocking tile. Each fails differently.

A single slipped or cracked slate. The slate is often sound and the copper or iron nail holding it has corroded. If the slates around it are firm, we slide in a matching natural slate and hold its tail with a tingle, a lead or copper strip fixed to the batten and turned up. A cracked slate is cut out with a slate ripper and replaced the same way.

Decorative ridges. The crested or rolled ridge pieces on these slate roofs sit in mortar, and the bedding crumbles until the wind takes a piece. We lift the loose run, clean it, rebed it and add a fixing under each piece so it stays put. A broken piece is matched from reclaimed stock, because a plain modern ridge in the middle of an ornamental run is obvious from the green.

The long rear catslide. Many of the late Victorian brick houses have a slated slope that runs from the ridge down over the back rooms. It has a lot of slate and a long run of water, so a slipped slate near the eaves shows as damp on a ground floor ceiling. Lift a few and you can check the battens and underlay at the same time.

Clay plain tile and tile hanging. Old handmade tiles laminate and shed their face after frost, and the nibs or pegs that hang them fail. We replace the bad ones with reclaimed tiles of the same size and colour, hung on a hook where a nail cannot reach. Tile hung gables and fronts lose tiles the same way, and we refix those course by course.

Valleys, soakers and flashings. A bonnet or laced clay valley, or a lead one, takes the water off two slopes at once, and a split or a blockage there puts a lot of water inside. Where a roof meets a wall we check the lead soakers under the tiles and the stepped flashing over them, and renew the lead where it has split. Splits along a long run of lead are a sign it was laid in lengths too long to move, so the new lead goes in shorter pieces.

Chimney leaks. A tall old brick stack lets water in through cracked flaunching round the pots, a stepped flashing pulled out of its joint, or a back gutter on the uphill side choked with moss. A stain beside the chimney breast upstairs points to the stack. See chimney repairs for the brickwork itself.

Concrete tile on the newer houses and bungalows. Hip and ridge tiles come loose as their mortar goes, verge mortar falls out of the gable, and the old sarking felt perishes at the eaves where it dips into the gutter. We rebed with a mechanical fixing, or dry fix the ridge and verge, as BS 5534 expects, and let a strip of new membrane in at the eaves.

Flat roofs. Felt, GRP and EPDM over extensions, garages and dormers leak at a blister, a split, a lifted upstand against the house wall or a blocked outlet. A patch works on a dry, firm deck. A soft deck needs replacing, see flat roofing in Walhampton and Portmore. Damp high on an outside wall is often an overflowing gutter, covered on fascias, soffits and guttering.

Repair or replace. A handful of slates on an otherwise firm slope is a repair. Slates slipping on every part of the slope, or clay tiles crumbling wherever you touch them, means the fixings or the tiles are at the end of their life, and that becomes whole-roof work for our roofers in Walhampton and Portmore. We tell you which one your roof is, with photographs to show why.

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.

Planning here is the New Forest National Park Authority's. Replacing a slate, a tile or a ridge piece in the same material is maintenance under the Planning Portal guidance on roofs, so an unlisted house needs no application for a like for like 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. If the water shows beside a chimney breast or high on a gable wall, mention it when you ring, since that tells us to look at the stack lead and the verge before the slates. 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

Worth knowing

Matching a slate, a ridge or a pot inside the conservation area

Walhampton and Portmore are both character areas of the Forest South East Conservation Area. Its appraisal records slate arriving here from the mid nineteenth century, long slated catslides on the backs of brick houses, decorative ridges on a group of Portmore cottages, and plain clay tile on the older Walhampton buildings. It discourages concrete tiles, whose heavy profile stands out, and asks for chimney stacks and pots to be kept, old Fareham pots included. Nine buildings in the Walhampton character area are listed, and none in Portmore's.

That shapes the repair. A broken ridge piece or a few slates are replaced with matching reclaimed slate and ridge, never concrete, so the job stays maintenance. A leaking stack is cured with new lead and new flaunching around the pots, and is not taken down or capped. A catslide shedding slates is mended slate by slate, or re-slated in natural slate. Switching it to concrete tile is the change the Park looks at, and a listed house needs consent for less. To see whether your address is listed, look it up on the National Park Authority's interactive property map, and the National Park heritage and conservation guidance sets out what the Park expects.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Walhampton and Portmore

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