Roofers in Boldmere

The streets off Boldmere Road are mostly late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces and semi-detached villas, and they present a particular set of problems that detached housing simply does not have. The roofs are joined. Your slate runs into next door's slate over a party wall, and the chimney stack sitting on that wall is usually shared as well. When a stack starts letting water in, the damp shows up in one house and the cause is in both.

That makes Boldmere a leadwork town more than a re-roofing town. Most of what we do here is stack flashings, back gutters, soakers and valley linings — the joints, not the field. The original lead on a lot of these roofs is thin, badly lapped, or has been patched at some point with mortar fillets that have cracked. A mortar fillet on a chimney is a repair with an expiry date. Lead, cut and dressed properly, is not.

Access is the other Boldmere reality and it changes the price. Half these streets have no rear vehicle access, terraces on both sides, and cars parked solid from seven in the morning. Scaffold has to be hand-carried through the house or craned over, and sometimes we need a permit and a chat with the neighbours before anything goes up. We would rather tell you that at survey than surprise you with it on the invoice.

Where we do full roofs in Boldmere, it is usually a Victorian slate that has run out of nail. The slate itself is often still sound — Welsh slate outlives the nails holding it — so the roof is not failing because the material is finished, it is failing because the fixings have rusted through. That job has an option most people are not offered: strip carefully, sort the salvageable slate, and re-lay it with new nails and new battens on a breathable membrane.