Roofing in Daventry, priced in writing before anything starts.
Daventry’s roofing work divides the same way the town does, and the estate side of it is the larger share.
The housing built from the 1960s onward is concrete tile on trussed rafters, laid in quantity and to a consistent standard. That makes diagnosis fairly quick. The usual failures on this stock are at the details rather than in the field of the roof: verges, ridges, flashings at abutments and the junctions where a later extension met an older roof and nobody thought hard about the flashing.
In the older core there is slate on cut timbers, with valleys and abutments that need lead renewed properly rather than patched again. A valley that has been sealed for twenty years will keep failing in the same place until it is done correctly.
The weight point matters when re-covering. 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 examining the structure first, get a second opinion.
Re-covering is where Building Regulations become involved, because replacing a substantial part of a covering triggers a requirement to look at insulation, and we arrange that inspection and see it through to sign off. In the conservation area the covering material is not a free choice. 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 West Northamptonshire 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 Daventry street to the next.
On the estates scaffold usually stands on your own ground, which keeps things simple. In the town centre it often has to stand on the footway or carriageway, which is a licence from West Northamptonshire Council as highway authority, arranged by the scaffold company and needed before the tower goes up. We do not strip more roof in a day than we can make watertight by the evening.
On the estate housing there is a recurring detail worth naming. Where an original roof met a later extension or a projecting porch, the flashing was often the weakest thing on the building and it is now decades old. Those junctions are where most of the leaks we are called to on this stock actually originate, rather than in the field of the roof itself, and they are usually a fraction of the cost of the re-cover people assume they need.
Part of our wider building work in Daventry.
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.
