Roofing in Banbury, priced in writing before anything starts.
Roofing around Banbury includes a covering we do not meet anywhere else on our patch, and it needs treating on its own terms.
Older buildings in this area frequently carry stone slate or handmade clay tile, laid in diminishing courses with the largest units at the eaves. That construction is heavy, it relies on the timbers below being sized for it, and its individual pieces cannot be bought off a pallet when they break. Stripping a roof like that is a sorting exercise as much as a stripping exercise: material is set aside, graded and reused, and only the shortfall is sourced.
The weight point cuts hard here. A roof built for a lighter modern covering will not take stone slate, and anybody proposing to reinstate a stone roof needs to have looked at the structure first rather than assuming it will go back the way it came off.
In a conservation area the covering is not a free choice, and on a stone village cottage the roof is frequently the most conspicuous thing about it. Substituting concrete for stone slate is the kind of change that is visible from the other side of the valley.
The estate housing in town is concrete tile on trussed rafters and much simpler. Re-covering triggers a Building Regulations requirement to look at insulation, and we arrange that inspection and see it through to sign off. More on our roofing page.
Four things we commit to on every job, rather than four things we say about ourselves.
Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations. We arrange the Cherwell District Council inspections, meet the inspector on site at each stage and see the work through to sign off. We do not make the application itself, and we will tell you what is needed and when.
Free, and you get it before you commit to us. Party walls and skip licences are raised at quotation stage, not three weeks into the dig.
The same people do the groundworks, the brickwork and the fit out. Nobody hands your job to a subcontractor you have never met.
You get a straight answer rather than a padded price. It costs us a job occasionally and saves you a great deal more.
Process, specification and what moves the price are set out on our roofing page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Banbury street to the next.
Scaffold on a village lane usually stands on the highway, which is a licence from Oxfordshire County Council arranged by the scaffold company and needed before the tower goes up. On a narrow lane the scaffold also has to leave the road passable, which takes designing rather than improvising.
Stone slate is heavy to handle and easy to break, so it comes down and goes back up carefully rather than quickly. That is time in the programme and it is honest to price it as such.
We do not strip more roof in a day than we can make watertight by the evening, which on a heavy traditional covering means shorter days than a modern re-cover would allow.
Part of our wider building work in Banbury.
Send photographs and a rough brief, or call and talk it through. We will tell you if a job is not right for us.
Southfield Construction (Rugby) Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company 14209138.
