Roofing in Broadstone

Nail sickness on the 1950s and 1960s stock. Nearly two thirds of Broadstone went up between 1945 and 1982, a quarter of the town in the late 1950s and early 1960s alone. Those concrete tile roofs were nailed with galvanised nails that rust from the head down.

The tile is still fine; the nail holding it is not, which is why a whole slope starts letting go within a year or two of the first one moving. Where the battens and underlay are sound the answer is re-fixing rather than re-covering, and we will tell you which of the two you have. BS 5534 sets out how a covering should be mechanically fixed for its exposure.

Ridge, hip and verge, which is most of a bungalow roof. Two in five homes in Broadstone are bungalows, and a bungalow has roughly twice the roof of a house with the same floor area, most of it edge. Hipped ends mean long hip runs, and every one of them is mortar bedding that cracks, washes out and drops. We convert to a dry fix system: a dry ridge screwed to a ventilated roll, dry verge units closing the gables, and hips mechanically fixed. It is the single most useful thing you can do to a roof of this age here.

A lot of the post-war building here sits at a shallow pitch, and pitch decides what covering is allowed. Some tiles cannot be laid below their minimum, and a plain tile will not go on a roof designed for an interlocking concrete tile. Where someone has already done it, water tracks back under the laps in driving rain and the leak looks like it comes from nowhere. On a strip we check the batten gauge against the tile, the underlay at the laps and eaves, and any rafter that has been taking water quietly.

Sixty years of rear additions, garages, porches and dormers, most of them flat and on their second or third covering. Felt, GRP fibreglass and EPDM rubber all last where the deck is sound and the falls and upstands are right. Chimney flashings, soakers, valleys and abutments go back in code rated lead. Then the rainwater side: clearing moss and debris, correcting a fall that has dropped, and renewing split gutters and downpipes. On ground that shrinks and swells, a downpipe emptying beside a foundation is a structural question rather than just a damp one. With 42% of Broadstone in bungalows the loft is large, easy to get at and the best value insulation there is, and Approved Document L sets what a renovated roof is expected to reach.

We do not quote by the square metre. A bungalow has roughly as much roof as floor, so for the size of the house you are buying far more roof, and far more of it is edge: hips, ridge, verges and eaves.

Repair or re-cover. Most houses in Broadstone went up after the war, many within a few years of each other, so the ridges and verges along a road tend to give up together. Often it is the bedding mortar under the hip and ridge tiles that has cracked, or a verge that has let go, while the concrete tiles themselves are sound. Re-bedding or dry fixing the edges is a far smaller job than stripping the lot, and Thomas will tell you which one your roof needs. If it is a single cracked hip or one leak you want found and stopped, that is on our page for roof repairs in Broadstone. The fixing standard is BS 5534.

What sits under the tiles. Roofs of that age were laid on bitumen felt, and by now it has often perished at the eaves. If it has, a re-cover means new battens and membrane right through, and the quote shows that as its own line.

The platform. A low bungalow can sometimes be worked off a tower, while a chalet or a two storey detached wants a full scaffold. The work at height rules are why it is priced separately. Chimneys, valleys and abutments against a garage wall are each priced one at a time.

Compare any other Broadstone quote line by line. Is the scaffold included? Are the battens and membrane being renewed or covered over? Who pays for the skip?

Broadstone sits on cohesive ground with a significant shrink-swell rating. Clay-rich soil of that kind takes up water and expands, then dries out and contracts, and it does it seasonally. Where that happens right beside a foundation, the movement is a structural question rather than just a damp one, which is why cracked render, sticking doors and stepped cracking in brickwork are more common around here than the age of the houses would suggest.

A roof contributes to that more than people realise. A blocked gutter, a split downpipe or a shoe discharging onto the soil next to a wall puts a concentrated, seasonal volume of water into exactly the ground that reacts to it.

On a bungalow, with twice the roof area per household draining through the same number of downpipes, the volumes are not small. So when we look at guttering here we are not only thinking about the wall getting wet. We check where the water actually ends up, and whether it is being delivered into the ground beside the house or taken away from it.

Broadstone is 7.3 miles from our base at 80a Wolverton Road in Boscombe. For roofs we cover Broadstone itself, Dunyeats, Corfe Hills and the Broadway, out to Merley, Corfe Mullen and Canford Magna, and BCP Council handles planning and building control here.

The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. It is Thomas Hannen's business, and Thomas comes out and prices your roof himself. One verified customer has scored us 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The site visit is free and so is the written quote, with every item listed. Before you book a visit in Broadstone, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Broadstone 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.