Roofing in Bashley

Every tile has a pitch it will not go below. Plenty of the roofs here 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 commonest job 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 round here 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.

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.

No rate per square metre: the area is the easiest thing to measure and the least useful thing to know. Single storey roofs are cheap to reach, because the eaves are low and there is room to stand a platform. What you save on access you spend on edge, because dry fixing is priced by the metre of ridge, hip and verge.

How long the platform stands matters as much as its size, and the work at height rules are why it is a priced line. Ask whether the scaffold is in the price and whether battens and membrane are renewed or covered over.

Two in five dwellings here are bungalows, a far higher share than the towns on either side, 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.