Roof repairs in Walmley
Concrete tile that looks perfectly fine from the ground, and a loft that is wet anyway. Here is why.
The most common call we get from Walmley is some version of: the roof looks fine, but the loft is damp. It is a fair description and it is exactly what a 1970s concrete tile roof looks like when it reaches the end of its life. Nothing is broken. Nothing has slipped. And water is getting in anyway.
There are two reasons and they work together. The first is the tile. Concrete does not fail the way slate does — slate stays good and the nails go, whereas concrete tile degrades in itself. The surface spalls, it gets porous, and a porous tile on the shallow pitch these estates were built to will let wind-driven rain track back up under the lap. The second is the underlay, and this is the one nobody sees. The bitumen felt used on these roofs has a shorter design life than the tiles above it. Fifty years on it is brittle, and it has usually torn along the eaves where it has been flapping in the wind. It is no longer the second line of defence it was meant to be, so anything that gets past the tile is now in your loft.
That combination is why a Walmley repair is a more honest conversation than most. A slipped tile we can put back and it will be fine. But if the tiles are porous and the felt is torn, we cannot fix that from the outside, and any patching we do is treating a symptom. We will tell you that even though "your roof needs a strip" is a much less comfortable sentence than "we popped a tile back for eighty quid".
Not everything in Walmley is that, though. Mortar verges and ridges blowing on the gable ends is a genuine repair, not a strip, and dry-verge and dry-ridge systems fix it permanently rather than restarting the clock. We will always look before we tell you the bad version.
What people in Walmley ask us.
The two we get most on this job round here. The full list is on our FAQ page, and the roof repairs page goes into the trade in more depth.
My roof looks fine but the loft is wet. How?
Porous concrete tiles on a shallow pitch let wind-driven rain back under the laps, and the fifty-year-old bitumen underlay beneath has gone brittle and torn at the eaves. Nothing is broken and water still gets in.
Can you just replace the underlay?
Not from outside — it sits under the battens and the tiles. Getting to it means stripping the covering, which is why underlay failure and a re-roof are effectively the same conversation.