Re-roofing and roof replacements in Gloucester

When a Gloucester roof has reached the end

Roofs do not usually fail all at once. They give you warning: two or three slipped tiles a winter instead of one every few years, damp appearing in more than one place, mortar you can crumble between your fingers, and daylight visible through the boarding when you put your head into the loft.

The age and covering tell you a lot. Natural slate on the Victorian terraces around Kingsholm and Barton can run well past a hundred years if the fixings hold, and is often worth repairing rather than replacing. The concrete interlocking tiles that went on the interwar and post-war semis through Longlevens, Tuffley and Matson are a different proposition — they get porous, start shedding their surface finish, and once several are failing across a slope a re-cover is usually cheaper over ten years than chasing them.

What a full re-roof includes

• Strip and dispose – old covering, battens and felt removed and taken away, with the site sheeted and kept tidy.
• Timber inspection – rafters and purlins checked once exposed, and anything rotten replaced. You see it before it is covered up.
• Breathable membrane – replacing old bitumen felt, so the roof space ventilates properly instead of trapping moisture.
• New treated battens – gauged to the covering, not reused.
• Your choice of covering – natural or fibre-cement slate, clay or concrete tile, matched to the house and the street.
• Leadwork renewed – chimney flashings, valleys and abutments redone in code-graded lead as part of the job, not left as the old detail under a new roof.
• Ridges, hips and verges – bedded and pointed, or dry-fixed where exposure justifies it.

Scaffold, timescale and disruption

A typical Gloucester semi or terrace takes most of a week with scaffold up, weather permitting. Scaffold goes up a day or two before and comes down within a few days of finishing, and we tell you the whole schedule before you commit. We work in sections and sheet up overnight so the house is never left open.

Getting a straight quote

We survey the roof properly, photograph what we find and set out the scope, the materials and the price in writing. If a repair would do instead, we will tell you — see roof repairs. For typical figures, the guide to what affects roofing costs gives realistic ranges, and the guarantee page explains exactly what is covered.