So, our roof was, as was suspected, hideous. Although the original survey stated ‘The roof will need to be replaced at some point in the future’, a statement that I felt was both startlingly accurate and also startlingly useless (up there with ‘surveyors are unable to see through solid walls’), I’d hoped it’d make it until we sell up and dash off to another land.
It had become apparent that this wasn’t going to happen last year, but the temporary repair held up until… well… late summer? So the scaffolding went up a bit over a week ago, and then last week, the roofer turned up and revealed horrors. Unfortunately I didn’t shimmy up the scaffold before they’d cleared the tiles off. Although I’d thought that the problems were mainly down to the valley rusting through (and cracking, it turns out), they actually went somewhat further. The valley was structured incorrectly, and the felt under the tiles was allowing water to run underneath it. Also, the felt at the bottom edge of the roof had rotted away almost completely…
As we’d agreed – and he’d presumed – he completely stripped the bay and also stripped back into the main roof allowing him to put new felt and battens down on the bay and on the renewed sections of the main roof.
Annoyingly, again, I didn’t take a shot that captured how far across they went (it was a few tiles into the main roof)… but I wasn’t going to spend the whole day up on the scaffold.
We didn’t get the tiles replaced either, well, a few were replaced but most were just reused. One of the ridge tiles disintegrated, so that’s been replaced but all the replacements were reclaimed. We could have gone for new tiles but I didn’t really want to have a completely different looking bay – it suggests that you might need to do the rest of the roof soon. Or at least, that’s what it suggests to me.
Anyhow, the new valleys look pretty damn good (a hell of a lot better than what was there), and apart from one tile that he didn’t replace that I’d’ve gone for changing (it’s delaminating a bit, if that’s the term for ceramic tiles disintegrating).
And the ridge is looking a hell of a lot better:
As a bonus whilst he was up there he capped off the two chimney stacks that we don’t use (front and rear bedroom)… Which means we’ve finally got them properly capped at the top and bottom (with a nice ventilator in them at the base). So whilst I’ve barely got off my arse, and progress inside has been non-existent, there has been actual progress on the house.
Hopefully this year we can have a warm and dry Christmas (and the same to all of you lovely folks :) )
