Roofing in Barton on Sea

The salt goes for the nails, not the tile. Barton sits a little over a kilometre from the water, and salt goes for the metal rather than the covering. Nails and clips corrode from the outside in, so a roof can look sound while what holds it down has gone. Stainless steel or silicon bronze on the seaward slopes, and we say so on the quote.

Ridge, hip and verge. The commonest job on this stock by a distance. At 42.0% bungalows the same footprint is spread over one floor, so there is far more edge per house than on anything two storey, and edge is what fails. Mortar bedding cracks, a hip tile rocks, a verge loses its fillet and the wind gets underneath. We convert to a dry fixed system screwed onto a ventilated roll, the mechanical fixing BS 5534 asks for, with dry verge units at the gable. It is priced by the metre of edge.

Repairs are slipped, cracked and missing tiles, storm damage and leaks chased back to where water genuinely enters rather than patched where the stain shows. Mostly concrete interlocking tile from the late fifties and sixties here, with plain clay tile and natural slate on the older houses. Once the nails, battens and underlay have gone together the covering comes off, soft rafter feet are cut out, and it goes back on breathable membrane and treated battens with a matched tile. There is no sarking board under a roof of this age, so the membrane and the batten gauge are the whole of the substrate.

Flat roofs over the attached garage, the rear extension and the porch, in felt, GRP fibreglass or EPDM rubber, with a corner of the deck opened before anything is quoted. Fewer chimneys on a bungalow than you would think and far more abutments, because every flat roofed extension meets a tiled slope or a wall somewhere, and that junction is where the leaks usually start. Code rated lead, cut so it can move without splitting.

Low eaves and long gutter runs make clearing debris easy and neglect expensive, since a gutter running over rots the fascia and soffit behind it. If we find cement rainwater goods on an older house we stop and tell you to have them tested rather than breaking them up. With the covering off, insulation and eaves ventilation are far cheaper to deal with, and Approved Document L sets the standard a renovated roof is expected to reach.

How much edge there is. Ridge, hips and verges are measured and priced in metres. A long low roof with two hips and a pair of gables carries far more of it than a plain gable ended box, and that one figure moves an edge job more than anything else on the quote.

Low eaves mean some jobs come off a tower rather than a full scaffold. It is still work at height, and the work at height rules are why the platform is a priced line. Ask what the nails and clips are made of on the seaward slope, and whether battens and underlay are renewed or covered over.

Two in five dwellings here are bungalows, a far higher share than anywhere inland of us, and it changes the arithmetic on most jobs. The same living space sits under roughly twice the roof area of a two storey house, with far more ridge, hip and verge per household, so edge work comes up again and again and a full re-cover costs more than the size of the house suggests.

Two things follow. The access is cheap, so the survey is honest: we can see all of the roof properly rather than guessing at a slope from the ground. And the loft is enormous relative to the house, so it is losing more heat than the same loft on a semi, and it is the one thing worth sorting while the covering is off and the platform is already paid for.