Roofing in Northampton, priced in writing before anything starts.
Northampton has two roofing populations and assuming the wrong one is expensive.
The terraced quarter is largely slate on cut timbers, in long continuous runs with shared party details and valleys where rows meet. Those junctions are where water gets in, and a valley patched for twenty years will keep failing at the same point until the lead is renewed properly. Sealant delays the conversation rather than ending it.
Chimney stacks deserve particular mention on this stock. On a terrace the stacks are shared, exposed on all sides and usually still carrying original flaunching. Once the roof around a stack has been patched a few times the stack is generally next, and if scaffold is up for a re-cover, dealing with it then costs a fraction of bringing scaffold back in three years.
There is a specific Northampton case worth knowing. Where a terrace adjoins a former factory building, the roofs meet at a junction between two quite different structures of different heights, and those abutments were rarely detailed well. They are a common source of persistent leaks that get blamed on the wrong building.
The later housing is concrete tile on trussed rafters. 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. Re-covering triggers a Building Regulations requirement to look at insulation and we arrange that inspection. 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 Northampton street to the next.
Scaffold on a terraced frontage usually stands on the footway or carriageway, which is a highway licence from West Northamptonshire Council, 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 again by the evening. On a continuous terrace that discipline protects your neighbours as well as you, because an open roof in a long run is everybody’s problem.
In a conservation area the covering material is not a free choice, so we check before quoting and quote what will actually get through rather than the cheapest option.
Where a leak is at a junction rather than in the covering we say so, even though a repair is worth a great deal less to us than the full re-roof somebody else has quoted for.
Part of our wider building work in Northampton.
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.
