Roofing in Ferndown

Tired and finished are not the same roof. Signs a covering is finished and not just damaged: tiles that have lost their colour and gone pale grey with a rough sandy face, flaking faces with grit collecting in the gutters, slipped and missing tiles in ones and twos all over the roof, not in one place, which means the nails are going and it is not one tile failing, and daylight through the felt from inside the loft.

One of those on its own is a repair. Several together is a re-cover.

Over half of Ferndown was built between 1945 and 1982, with the largest cohort in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and almost everything here is concrete interlocking tile on a shallow pitch, a great deal of it on wide single-storey plans. Plain clay tile and natural slate turn up only on the older houses, where a plain tile roof is nailed to battens rather than interlocked, and there is no stone slate here. Two in five homes are bungalows, so there is a lot of ridge, hip and verge for the size of house, and the fault is usually a fixing or a junction rather than the covering itself. Most repairs take hours, not days. If all you need is one slipped tile put back, a cracked hip rebedded or a drip traced to its source, that is on our page for roof repairs in Ferndown. When the nails, battens and underlay have gone together the covering comes off, soft timber is replaced, and it goes back on breathable membrane and treated battens with a matched tile, ridges and hips screwed down rather than bedded in mortar, which is what BS 5534 expects. Cracked mortar bedding is the usual finding, and the answer is a dry fix system with dry ridge and dry verge units screwed over a vented roll.

Nearly a third of the dwellings here are flats or maisonettes, where the roof belongs to the freeholder and is managed out of the service charge, so the person who rings is often not the person who can instruct the work. We will still come out and put the scope in writing for the agent.

Rear extensions, garages, dormers and porches come in felt, GRP fibreglass or EPDM rubber, and we look at the deck before the falls, upstands and outlet. Chimney flashings, soakers, valleys and abutments go back in code rated lead, and most leaks on these roofs start at a junction. A fair share of apparent roof leaks turn out to be a gutter running over or a downpipe discharging into thin air, which on ground that shrinks and swells matters beside a foundation. While the roof is open, insulation, eaves ventilation and any condensation problem are far cheaper to sort, and Approved Document L sets the standard a renovated roof is expected to reach.

A roof here is never priced per square metre. The same area costs very differently over a bungalow and over a three storey block.

Edges. A broad single storey plan puts a big roof on a modest house, with long lengths of ridge, hip and verge. Each of those is bedded in mortar or held by a dry fix system and finished with lead, and that is where the labour sits.

Scaffold time. With low eaves, a bungalow often needs no more than a tower. A block wants scaffold on all sides, and for weeks. The hire bill grows the longer it stands, and the HSE's work at height rules govern what has to go up, so it is shown on the quote.

Beneath the covering. Roofs of this vintage were usually laid in concrete interlocking tiles over bitumen felt, and the felt tends to rot at the eaves first. Renewing the battens and membrane at the same time is the honest way to do it, and it changes the figure.

Chimneys and valleys. Each chimney, valley and abutment is costed on its own, since the leadwork hours sit there.

Blocks. Large works on flats may trigger a section 20 consultation with leaseholders, which the managing agent runs before anyone starts.

Find out from any rival quote whether scaffold is included, whether the battens and membrane are being replaced, and whose the skip is.

Over four in ten homes in Ferndown are bungalows, which means the roof covers the whole footprint and is the largest surface on the building. A re-roof stops water getting in. It does nothing on its own about heat getting out, and on a house of this vintage that is usually where the money is going.

The typical picture: insulation laid between the joists and never topped up across them, so every joist is a cold line straight through the layer. Boarding screwed down onto the insulation, crushing it flat. Gaps round the hatch, the tank and the downlighters. And eaves ventilation blocked by insulation pushed too far into the corner.

Doing it during a re-roof is cheaper and cleaner than doing it later, and it lets us deal with airflow and insulation together rather than solving one and creating a condensation problem with the other. Approved Document L sets the standard where more than half a roof is renovated.

Our base in Boscombe is 5.9 miles from Ferndown. For roofs we cover the town plus Stapehill, Tricketts Cross, Dudsbury, West Parley and Longham, and it is Dorset Council that handles planning and building control.

You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, a limited company in England and Wales, number 15471719. It belongs to Thomas Hannen, who inspects your roof and prices it himself. On Checkatrade, a verified customer gave us 10 out of 10. Nothing is charged for the visit or for the itemised quote he writes. Before you book a visit in Ferndown, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Ferndown 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.