Roofing in Ashley

The junction where an addition meets the house. Start here, because this is where an older roof and a newer one meet. A back addition, a wider garage or a sun room built later gives you an abutment against a wall or a valley cut into the original slope.

Done properly that junction is code rated lead in short lengths, each free to move and turned into a chased joint. Done badly it is mastic or self adhesive flashing over the top, which buys a winter.

Ridge, hips and verges. With 41.8% of the dwellings bungalows, a hipped roof here carries a lot of edge for the floor area under it, and all of it was bedded in sand and cement when the house was built. The mortar ages, not the tile: it opens along the joint, lets water behind, and the hip tiles start to travel. We lift the lot and refit dry, each ridge and hip tile screwed over a ventilated roll and dry verge units clipped along the gable. BS 5534 wants that fixing mechanical, and the roll opens an air path at the apex that mortar closes off.

The estate roofs are concrete interlocking tile laid from the late fifties on, with plain clay tile and natural slate on the inter-war houses. Repairs are a slipped course, a cracked tile after a gale, a hip tile you can rock by hand, and a leak followed back to where water gets in rather than sealed at the stain. When it is one slipped tile or a single leak and the rest of the roof is sound, our page on roof repairs in Ashley covers that job on its own.

Sixty years is a long time to ask of bitumen felt. It splits where it laps into the gutter, the one place it is doing real work, and there is no sarking board behind it at this age, so once a tile lifts that felt is the whole weatherproofing, and we check it from the loft first. When the felt tears at a touch and the batten ends crumble, the lot comes off, wet rafter feet are spliced, and it goes back on breathable membrane and treated battens with a matched tile.

Flat roofs over the garage, the utility and the porch in felt, GRP fibreglass or EPDM rubber, with a corner of the deck opened before the falls, upstands and outlet are set. Low eaves make clearing the gutter cheap maintenance, and capping a soft timber fascia in plastic puts a lid on the rot without stopping it. Over a bungalow the loft is the whole footprint of the house, so insulation and eaves ventilation are worth doing while the covering is off, and Approved Document L sets the standard a renovated roof is expected to reach.

Roofs are not priced per square metre. Measuring the area tells you less than the shape and age of the roof.

More roof per room. A big share of homes in Ashley are bungalows. Put the same floor area under one storey instead of two and you get about double the roof, and a hipped one carries far more hip, ridge and verge per household. Those are the slow, hand-fixed parts, now mechanically fixed to BS 5534 rather than bedded in mortar alone.

A cheaper platform. The other side is access. A single storey roof needs only a low scaffold, the drives are wide and most plots have a side gate, so materials rarely travel far. The time it stands still counts, and HSE guidance on roof work governs how it goes up.

What the decades have done. Roofs of this age often carry concrete tiles on the original bitumen felt, which has gone brittle at the eaves, over battens that have lost their grip on the nails. Some were re-covered in heavier interlocking tiles years ago, and the rafters are worth checking under that weight.

The weather side. The south west slopes take the wind and driven rain, so the verges and ridge on that side usually fail first and set the fixing specification.

Junctions. Each chimney, valley and abutment has its own line, and so does the joint where an extension or garage roof meets the house.

Check with any other roofer that scaffold is included, that the old felt and battens are coming off and not staying, and that the skip is in their figure.

Roofs in Ashley, Bashley and Fernhill, and the BH25 streets on the New Milton side, are 8.9 miles from our base in Boscombe, with planning and building control at New Forest District Council.

Thomas Hannen climbs up to look at your roof and works out the price himself, because the business is his: Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. On Checkatrade a verified customer marked the work 10 out of 10. There is no fee for the visit, and the written quote lists every item at no cost. Before you book a visit in Ashley, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Ashley need no application at all. What decides whether a change to the outside of your house does is who the council is, whether a conservation area or a listing applies, and whether the place sits in a protected landscape.