Roofing in Lover

Re-laying is the job nobody offers you. Better than a quarter of the housing here predates 1919, and on a roof that old a good proportion of the covering is still sound. So we strip, sort on the ground, re-lay the best of it on the elevation that faces the lane and put new or reclaimed to the back. You keep the look of the house and buy a new roof underneath it. The old cottages run to plain tile and clay tile, some of it handmade and cambered, with natural slate on a few, and there is no stone slate in this corner of Wiltshire. The nib or the peg gives out long before the tile does, so a slipped tile is usually a fixing problem, and we keep salvaged tile by size and colour, because matching matters more here than on anything built since.

Most old roofs here have no sarking board and the very oldest had nothing under the battens at all. That roof has been drying itself through the covering for a century. Put a sealed underlay beneath it and the moisture stops where the rafters are, so we use a breathable membrane with a ventilated eaves detail on treated battens, and replace rafter feet that have gone soft rather than sistering over them. On the newer roofs in the village we convert to dry ridge and dry verge on a ventilated roll, the mechanical fixing BS 5534 expects. On old soft brick and old tile that is often the wrong answer, and the ridge goes back in a lime mortar bedding that will give a little rather than a cement one that cracks the tile it is meant to hold.

Cottages of this age carry big stacks, and the stack is where the water gets in: flashings, soakers, back gutters, valleys and the abutment where a lean-to meets the wall, all in code rated lead cut short enough to move without splitting, with cracked flaunching at the top a common and easy fix. The outshot, the lean-to and the later garage are felt, GRP fibreglass or EPDM rubber, with the deck, falls, upstands and outlet checked before anything is priced. Cast iron gutters are worth repairing rather than swapping for plastic, and a rotted fascia usually started as an overflowing gutter. Trees close in on these lanes, so clearing moss and debris comes round often. Thatch we decline. While a covering is off, insulation and eaves ventilation are far cheaper to sort, and Approved Document L sets the standard a renovated roof is expected to reach.

Lover is about twenty miles out and the lanes are narrow, so a scaffold lorry cannot always get to the house. Where it cannot, the platform is unloaded short and barrowed in, and that is a real line on the quote rather than something we absorb quietly and make up elsewhere. How long it stands matters as much as its size, and the work at height rules are why it is a line of its own rather than an optional extra. Ask whether the scaffold is in the quote, whether battens and membrane are renewed, and who takes the old tiles away.

About twenty miles from us and out most weeks, covering Lover, Redlynch, Woodfalls and the SP5 addresses on the western edge of the forest, with the New Forest National Park Authority for planning and Wiltshire Council for building control.

Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free.