Roof Repairs in South London

Almost every leak we attend comes back to one of a short list of failures. None of them need a new roof, and a roofer who opens with one is not looking properly.

Water does not come through where it lands. It runs along a batten, down a rafter and drops through the ceiling several feet from the hole. This is why leaks get chased and half-fixed, sometimes for years.

We work back from the stain: into the loft where there is one, along the run, up onto the roof, and we photograph the whole path. You get those photographs whether or not you go ahead with the work. If we cannot find it on the first visit — occasionally, on a complicated roof, we cannot — we come back rather than guess at your expense.

The honest test is how much of the roof has failed, not how old it is. A slate roof laid in 1900 with sound timbers and twenty slipped slates is a repair. A 1970s concrete tile roof with sagging battens and nail fatigue across the whole slope is not, and patching it is money thrown away.

As a rule of thumb, if the failures are spread across more than about a third of a slope, or the battens and membrane have gone, re-roofing that slope costs less over ten years than repairing it three more times. We will show you which of those you have and let you decide.

Access is the single biggest variable in the price of a repair, and it has almost nothing to do with the roof. A slipped slate on a two-storey rear slope, with a garden to stand a ladder in, is an hour's work. The identical slate on a third-storey front elevation over a pavement needs a tower or a scaffold, a council licence for the footway and sometimes a suspended parking bay — and the access then costs more than the repair.

So we tell you which of those two you have at the survey, and the access goes on the quote as its own line rather than disappearing into a rate. Where a job can honestly be done from a ladder and a roof ladder, that is how we do it. Where it cannot, we say so. Most of the failed repairs we get called back to were done by somebody reaching from a ladder that was two metres short.

Scaffold is not always the expensive answer either. If several things on the house need doing — the ridge, a flashing, the gutters, the fascias repainted — putting them all on one set of access costs far less than three visits with three towers. Send us the whole list and we will tell you what is worth grouping.

A roof keeps its real condition underneath the covering. The nails, the battens and the underlay are what usually fail first on a South London house, and not one of the three can be judged from the ground, from a drone photograph or over the phone. What we can tell you from a ladder is what has moved and where the water is getting in. What is under it stays a question until something comes off.

That is why our quotes carry a stated allowance for battens and small timber repairs, so the ordinary finds are already paid for, and why anything past that allowance stops the job rather than growing the invoice. We photograph it, ring you, and you decide before anything further is cut or lifted.

It is also why a price given over the phone is worth so little. Anyone quoting your roof without seeing it is either guessing high to be safe or guessing low and intending to find something later.

There is a 24-hour call-out line, and a text or an email reaches us if we are on a roof when you ring. If water is coming in now we will talk you through making it safe while we are on the way: a bucket and a moved wardrobe buys more time than people expect.

For anything not urgent we book a free survey, usually within a few days. You get a fixed, itemised price in writing before any work starts, and the people who quoted the job are the people who turn up to do it.