Roofing in Holton Heath

Eighties tiles are sound, eighties nails are not. More than a third of the dwellings here went up between 1983 and 2008, most of them in the 1980s, and the commonest finding on a roof of that age is that the concrete interlocking tiles are fine and the nails holding them are not. Concrete tile of that era outlasts its own fixings. Steel corrodes at the head, the tile drops a fraction, and the slope starts shedding one tile a winter. That is a strip and re-cover rather than a repair, and it is worth knowing early rather than paying for six patch visits first. Mortar bedding of the same era cracks, a ridge tile rocks, the gable verge loses its haunching and a cap ends up on the drive, so ridge and hip go to a dry fix system screwed onto a ventilated roll and the gable to dry verge, the mechanical fixing BS 5534 asks for.

The bitumen felt used through the seventies and eighties goes brittle and tears where it laps into the gutter, exactly where it has to be sound, and a wet fascia is often the first sign. Plain clay tile and natural slate turn up on the older properties, some of it on sarking boards, which changes the strip. On a plain tile roof of that age it is the nibs and the nails that go rather than the clay. Cement fillets instead of lead were common on estate housing of this period and crack along the joint every time, so they come out and code rated lead flashings, soakers and abutment pieces go in. Garages, porches and rear extensions are mostly on their original felt, GRP or EPDM and well past it, so the deck is the first thing we open up. Original plastic rainwater goods go chalky and sag between brackets, and a sagging run holds water, collects the debris and algae washed off the slope, and overflows behind the fascia. Houses of this vintage were insulated to the standard of the day and are well short of what Approved Document L now expects of a renovated roof, which is cheapest to put right with the covering off.

Access here is usually in your favour. Most plots have a drive and a side gate, so the scaffold and the skip stand on your own ground rather than the road, and a lorry has somewhere to tip a load of battens. Bungalows and chalets get to the roof cheaply, while anything with a two storey rear addition and a valley costs more to reach than its size suggests. The work at height rules are why the platform is a line of its own, priced by how long it stands. Ask whether the scaffold is in the quote and who takes the old tiles away.

The ground round here is cohesive and rated as shrinking and swelling with the weather, which turns an ordinary roofing question into a structural one. A roof throws a surprising volume of water at the ground in a downpour, and on this sort of soil it matters a great deal where that water lands.

So we look at the bottom of the downpipe as carefully as the top of the roof. Does it discharge into a gully that goes somewhere, or into a soakaway, or onto a border a foot from the wall? Approved Document H sets out where rainwater is allowed to go, and a soakaway on ground like this has to sit well clear of the building and will often fail its percolation test, so a positive outfall is usually the honest answer.

It is also why an overflowing gutter is worth more attention here than the same gutter on sand: the nuisance is the same, and what it is doing to the ground beside the footing is not.