Roofing in Coventry, priced in writing before anything starts.
Coventry has two roofing populations and the wrong assumption about which you have is expensive.
The older terraces are largely slate on cut timbers, often with valley gutters and shared party details where the terrace runs. Valleys and abutments are where the water gets in, and a valley that has been patched for twenty years will keep failing in the same place until the lead is renewed properly. Sealant does not fix it, it just delays the conversation.
The post-war housing is concrete tile on trussed rafters. The mistake here runs the other way round. A roof built for concrete tile will generally take slate, but a roof built for slate cannot always take concrete tile, because concrete is heavier. If somebody offers to re-cover an old slate roof in concrete without looking at the structure first, get a second opinion.
Re-covering is the point where Building Regulations become involved, because replacing a substantial part of a covering triggers a requirement to look at the insulation. We arrange the inspection for that and see it through to sign off.
Inside a conservation area the covering material is not a free choice, and with eighteen of them in the city this comes up more often here than elsewhere. We check before quoting and we quote what will actually get through. More on coverings, flat roofs and repairs 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 Coventry City 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 Coventry street to the next.
Scaffold on a Coventry terrace frontage usually has to stand on the footway or the road, which is a licence from Coventry City Council as highway authority, arranged by the scaffold company. It has to be in hand before the tower goes up. We also do not strip more roof in a day than we can make watertight by the evening, even where the programme would prefer otherwise.
Chimney stacks are the part of a Coventry terrace roof most likely to be quietly failing. On a shared stack the flaunching and the flashings are usually original, the stack is exposed on all sides, and it is the first thing to suffer once the roof around it has been patched a few times. If we are scaffolded for a re-cover it is far cheaper to deal with the stack at the same time than to bring the scaffold back in three years for a job that was visible from the first day.
Part of our wider building work in Coventry.
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.
