Roofing in Holt

Half the work out here is not on the house. Garages, stables, workshops, stores and single storey extensions, usually flat or shallow pitched, in felt, GRP fibreglass or EPDM rubber. All three last when the deck is sound and the falls, upstands and outlet are right, and on a building nobody goes into it is the outlet that has quietly failed, so we look at the deck before quoting anything. On the house it is slipped, cracked and missing tiles, a ridge tile that rocks under your hand, a verge that has lost its bedding, and leaks traced back to where water genuinely enters rather than patched where the stain shows. Coverings vary plot to plot: plain clay tile and natural slate on the older cottages, interlocking concrete tile on the later houses. Under all of it sit the battens, the underlay and the rafter feet, and with no sarking board on most roofs here, a corroded nail or clip is usually what let go. Whatever is over you, the fault is nearly always a fixing or a junction rather than the covering, so most repairs are hours rather than days.

Open ground with fields and heath on the windward side means the wind gets a proper run at a roof, and it works at the edges rather than the middle. We convert cracked mortar bedding to a dry fixed ridge screwed onto a ventilated roll, which is the mechanical fixing BS 5534 asks for, with dry verge units at the gable, measured by the metre of edge. Chimney flashings, soakers, back gutters, valleys and the abutments where a roof meets a wall go back in code rated lead cut so it can move. Long gutter runs on low buildings, with heath, pine and oak dropping into them all year, so clearing that debris out is regular work here, and a fair share of the leaks we attend turn out to be a gutter running over or a downpipe discharging into thin air. With the covering off, insulation and eaves ventilation are far cheaper to sort, and Approved Document L sets the standard a renovated roof is expected to reach.

Access out here is the big one: where a scaffold stands, whether a lorry can get down the lane and turn, and whether the ground beside the house will take a tower or needs boarding out. We settle that on the first visit, before anything is priced, and the work at height rules are why the platform goes on the quote as its own line rather than an optional extra. A house with three outbuildings has four roofs, and doing them under one scaffold and one skip beats doing them one winter at a time. Ask whether access is in the quote and who takes the waste away.

The ground under Holt is clay, slow draining and prone to shrinking and swelling with the seasons. That is not a roofing problem until you notice that everything the roof collects gets delivered to one or two spots at the bottom of a downpipe.

It matters in two directions. A soakaway dug into this ground will usually fail its percolation test, so roof water wants a positive outfall to a drain or a ditch rather than a pit that fills and stays full. And a downpipe discharging into a cracked gully or straight onto a border is putting a roof's worth of rainwater beside a foundation in ground that moves.

When we quote a roof we look at where the water leaves it as well: Approved Document H sets out where it is supposed to end up, and sorting a gully or a shoe while the scaffold is up is a small job rather than a separate one.