Roofing in Bashley

Every tile has a pitch it will not go below. Plenty of the roofs in Bashley sit at a shallow pitch, and every tile has a minimum pitch it is rated to work at. Swapping a low pitch interlocking tile for a plain tile or a slate that wants a steeper roof is how a roof that never leaked starts leaking, so we measure the pitch before we price a covering.

Ridge, hip and verge. The weak point on this patch, because a low wide roof is mostly edge and two houses in five here are bungalows. Mortar bedding cracks, a ridge tile starts to rock and a verge loses its haunching long before anything goes wrong in the field of the slope. We convert ridge and hip to a dry fix system, screwed and clipped onto a ventilated roll, and gable ends to dry verge. That is the mechanical fixing BS 5534 asks for, and it ventilates the roof space along the ridge at the same time.

Repairs are slipped, cracked and missing tiles, storm damage, and a leak traced back to where water genuinely enters rather than patched where the stain shows. What is on the roofs around Bashley is mostly concrete interlocking tile, with plain clay tile and natural slate on the older properties. When the nails have rusted through, the battens have gone soft and the underlay tears at a touch, the covering comes off, soft rafter feet are replaced, and it goes back on breathable membrane and treated battens with a matched tile. If it is one loose ridge, a single leak or a split soaker, our page on roof repairs in Bashley covers mending that fault without a new covering.

Garages, sun lounges, porches and rear additions in felt, GRP fibreglass or EPDM rubber, opened up at the deck before the falls, upstands and outlet are set. Chimney flashings, soakers, valleys and the abutments where a roof meets a wall go in code rated lead cut so it can move, and a hipped roof with something added on the back carries more valleys than you would expect.

Low eaves make a long run of rainwater goods easy to reach, and clearing leaves out of the gutter and downpipe heads off the rotted fascia it otherwise causes. The loft floor here covers the whole footprint rather than half of it, so insulation, eaves ventilation and any condensation problem are worth sorting while the access is already paid for, and Approved Document L sets the standard a renovated roof should reach.

We will not give you a figure per square metre. Area is easy to measure but tells you little about the work.

Hips and edges. Many Bashley bungalows have hipped roofs, which carry more ridge, hip and verge than a gable ended house of the same footprint. Modern roofs dry fix those edges instead of bedding them in mortar, and that work is priced by the metre. The platform is cheap on a low roof; the edges are where the money goes.

Age. A nineties house usually has concrete interlocking tiles on trussed rafters with a membrane under the battens. The tiles themselves are often fine, and the leak comes from a slipped ridge or a worn valley. An older cottage may have clay tiles on its original battens and no membrane, which is a bigger job.

Height. Low eaves mean a bungalow can often be done from a tower. A chalet or two storey house needs full scaffold, and the longer it stays the more it costs, which is why the HSE work at height rules put it on a line of its own.

The weather side. Wind and rain come from the south west, so the verges and ridge on that side are checked first against the tiling code of practice.

Ask any other roofer whether scaffold is included, whether the battens and membrane will be replaced or left, and whether the ridge and hips will be dry fixed or bedded.

Two in five dwellings here are bungalows, about 40% of the homes in Bashley, and it changes the arithmetic of a roof. Same floor area, roughly twice the covering, and most of the extra spread across hips and long ridge lines rather than two plain slopes.

So the fixings holding the roof down matter more than the tiles themselves, and a bungalow that has never let a drop through the middle of a slope can still be quietly losing its ridge.

It also changes what is worth doing while we are up there. The loft covers the whole footprint, so topping up insulation and opening up eaves ventilation costs the same in labour as it would on a smaller loft and returns about twice as much. The drawback of the shape is that a broad shallow roof throws a lot of water into a short length of gutter, so the rainwater goods work harder than they look and want clearing more often.

Most repairs in Bashley 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.