Roofing in Leicester, priced in writing before anything starts.
Leicester roofing is dominated by Victorian and Edwardian housing, and on that stock the trouble is almost never in the main slope.
It is in the additions. A house of this type has a bay roof, frequently a porch roof and a rear addition roof, and every one of those is a small roof meeting a large one at an abutment. Those junctions were flashed once, a century ago, and they are where the water gets in. We are called to far more failed abutments and bay roofs in this city than failed main coverings, and the repair is usually a fraction of the re-cover people assume they need.
Chimney stacks are the other recurring item. On a terrace the stacks are shared, exposed on every side and usually still carrying original flaunching, and once the roof around a stack has been patched a few times the stack is next.
Covering is slate or clay tile on cut timbers, and inside a conservation area the material is not a free choice. The later housing at the city edges is concrete tile on trussed rafters and much simpler, though 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 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 Leicester 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 Leicester street to the next.
Scaffold on a Leicester terraced frontage usually stands on the footway or carriageway, which is a highway licence from Leicester City Council rather than from the county, arranged by the scaffold company and needed before the tower goes up.
On a villa plot the scaffold usually stands on your own ground, which avoids the licence entirely and takes both cost and lead time out of the job.
We do not strip more roof in a day than we can make watertight again by the evening, even where the programme would prefer otherwise, because a roof left open overnight in bad weather costs far more than the day it saved.
Part of our wider building work in Leicester.
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.
