Roofing in Kenilworth, priced in writing before anything starts.
Kenilworth roofing is dominated by the Victorian and Edwardian villas, and on those the trouble is almost never in the main slope.
It is in the additions. A villa of this type has a bay roof, often a porch roof, frequently a rear addition roof, and every one of those is a small roof meeting a big one at an abutment. Those junctions were flashed once, a hundred years ago, and they are where the water gets in. We are called out to far more failed abutments and bay roofs in this town than failed main coverings, and the repair is usually a fraction of the re-cover people assume they need.
Covering is slate or clay tile on cut timbers. Inside the conservation area the material is not a free choice, and around Avenue Road the roofscape is part of what the designation protects.
The later housing is concrete tile on trussed rafters and much simpler. The weight point still holds: a roof built for concrete tile will generally take slate, but a roof built for slate cannot always take concrete tile.
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 Warwick 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 Kenilworth street to the next.
On a villa plot the scaffold usually stands on your own ground, which avoids the county highway licence entirely and takes both cost and lead time out of the job. At the castle end, where buildings meet the footway, a licence is needed before the tower goes up.
We do not strip more roof in a day than we can make watertight by the evening, even where the programme would prefer otherwise, because a roof left open overnight costs far more than the day it saved.
Gutters on these villas are longer, higher and under far more leaf load than gutters on a modern house, because the plots are planted with mature trees. A blocked gutter on a tall building does not just overflow, it soaks the wall head and pushes water behind the fascia. On a plot like this, gutter clearing is genuine maintenance rather than tidiness, and while scaffold is up for anything else it is the cheapest hour of the job.
Part of our wider building work in Kenilworth.
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.
