Roofing in Freshwater and Totland

Fixings, because the salt gets them first. Salt does not eat a clay tile or a slate. It eats the nail head, the clip and the galvanised strap, and it does it years earlier here than two miles inland. So when we are called to three slipped slates we lift the courses either side as well, because three that have moved usually means a dozen that are about to. New work on the seaward slopes goes on stainless steel or silicon bronze, and where the exposure justifies it we increase the fixing pattern rather than change the covering. Wind does not lift the middle of a roof, it gets under an edge and works from there, so mortar bedding at the ridge and verge is the detail that fails first on this coast. Converting to a dry ridge screwed onto a ventilated roll and a dry verge clipped along the gable is the mechanical hold BS 5534 sets out, and it vents the roof space while it is at it. On an exposed site that is worth more than anything you could spend on the field of the roof.

Better than a quarter of the housing here predates 1919, so slate and plain clay tile are what comes off. Again the fault is not the slate but the nail: they corrode, the slates creep, and you get slippage a course at a time. Sound slate is stripped, sorted and re-hung on new fixings and clips with the battens renewed underneath. Tall chimney stacks come with it, since that is where the leadwork is. Close to three in ten dwellings are bungalows, and they behave differently. The slopes are long and often shallow, which puts you into a concrete interlocking tile rather than a plain tile, and there is far more gutter and fascia run per house than on a two storey property, so rainwater goods are a bigger share of the job. Access is the consolation: a lot of this work comes off a tower rather than a full scaffold.

Rear additions, dormers, garages and porches in felt, GRP fibreglass or EPDM rubber. The deck gets looked at before we price a covering, then the falls, the upstands and the outlet, because a flat roof fails at those three long before the membrane wears out. Chimney flashings, soakers, valleys and abutments go in code rated lead, sized and cut so it can move. A fair share of what gets reported as a roof leak here is a gutter overflowing in a gale or a downpipe discharging into nothing, and clearing moss, algae and debris is ordinary maintenance. A fifth of the stock is flats, so on a communal roof it is the freeholder or the managing agent who instructs the work rather than the person who rings. While a covering is off the loft gets sorted at the same time, insulation, eaves ventilation and any condensation problem, to the standard Approved Document L expects of a renovated roof.

Nobody can price this off an area. Everything we bring lands off a ferry, so a job here is sequenced so the crossing happens once: scaffold, battens, covering and lead arrive together and the waste goes back the same way. That is a planning line on the quote rather than a mystery. Some roofs come off a tower and most want a scaffold, and how long it stands matters as much as its size, which is why the work at height rules make it a line of its own. Ask whether the scaffold is in the quote and who takes the waste away.

More than a quarter of the housing here went up before 1919, which means solid walls with no cavity behind them. On a cavity wall a bit of overflow is a nuisance.

On a solid wall it is a direct path to the inside, and with a hard cement pointing or a modern impermeable paint on the outside the water that gets in has nowhere to go back out. That is why a rusted gutter joint or a downpipe that has come off its bracket shows up as damp on a bedroom wall in one winter here rather than three.

So on an older building we treat the rainwater goods as part of the roof rather than as trim, and we say so on the quote. It also changes materials at the top of the wall: a lime based bedding at the ridge and verge stays softer than the tile and gives before the tile does, where a hard cement mix cracks and then holds water in the crack.