Roofers in Foxhill

The Cornish unit houses are the signature of Foxhill. They are prefabricated, which means large parts of the structure were made elsewhere and assembled on site, and the mansard roof that tops each one gives a compact house a full upper storey without a conventional gable. For a roofer the first question is a simple one: what is on it now? After many years and perhaps several rounds of repair, the covering can be quite different from the one the house was built with.

A mansard has two zones. The lower slope is steep, and it can carry tiles, slates or a sheet material. The upper part is shallow, sometimes nearly flat, and it sheds water slowly, which makes the covering there more sensitive to age and to blocked outlets. The line between them, the break in the pitch, gets our longest look. Water running down the upper slope has to pass over the join, and any lifted edge or split lap gives it a way under the lower covering.

Fixings need thought too. A house built from prefabricated panels does not take a screw or a nail in the same way as a masonry wall, so we find out what is behind the surface before we fix anything to it. Boards, soffits and sheet materials from the post-war years are a further reason for care. If any of them might be asbestos cement, we have it identified before we cut it. Under HSE guidance, taking such sheets away whole and carefully is non-licensed work, and breaking them up substantially makes it notifiable.

If a mansard needs more than a patch, the answer is a covering matched to the roof's profile and a well-detailed break line. Our roof repairs service covers the first, and a re-cover follows the same survey.

Away from the mansards, many of the tiled roofs are concrete. They are durable, but they age in predictable places. The tile surface weathers and loses its coating, moss settles in the lap of each tile, and the ridge and hip tiles, once bedded in mortar, crack along their joints. When the mortar fillet goes, tiles can shift, and rainwater and wind-blown moisture reach the timbers below.

The remedy depends on how far the problem has travelled. A few loose tiles can be refixed or replaced. A ridge with failed mortar can be re-bedded and fixed mechanically, and many owners choose a dry-fix ridge (a system of clips and a ventilated cap that holds without mortar) for a lower-maintenance finish. If the verge fillets have washed out, we rebuild or replace them with a mechanical edge. Our work on ridge, hip and verge repairs follows exactly that sequence.

Underneath the tiles sits the underlay, which on a post-war roof may be an early bitumen felt. It sags, tears at the eaves and lets daylight through where it has been caught by a nail. If the tiles are sound, an eaves repair can extend the roof's life. If the felt has perished across the slope, lifting and relaying the tiles on new battens and underlay is the proper job.

Beside North Road, on the eastern edge, the appraisal notes a small pocket of earlier housing. What covers those roofs is something we check rather than presume. A house of a different age can have a different covering, different timbers and different flashings, so it gets its own look.