Pitched roof replacement in Four Oaks

A full roof on a Four Oaks detached is not a bigger version of a semi. It is a different job. Where a standard re-roof is three to five days, one of these is routinely two to three weeks, and the scaffold alone can cost more than an entire small re-roof elsewhere in Sutton. That is not us being expensive; it is the honest consequence of a roof with six pitches, four valleys, two dormers and a hundred metres of lead.

The valleys and the leadwork are where the money and the craft both go. On a roof this complicated the field of slate is the easy bit — any competent roofer can lay a plane. The junctions are what separate a roof that lasts a century from one that starts leaking in year six, and they cannot be rushed, because every one of them is cut and dressed on site to fit that specific angle.

The other Four Oaks reality is consent, and it changes the timeline more than the price. Much of the estate is a conservation area. If your specification stays like-for-like in natural slate you are generally free to proceed; if you want to change the covering, that may need an application, and an application is measured in weeks. We build that into the programme rather than discovering it after the scaffold is up. And because the estate has mature trees over most of it, we will talk to you at handover about a clearing cycle — the fastest way to shorten the life of a brand new slate roof is to let moss sit on it for twenty years.