Roofers in Okus

In the middle of the nineteenth century Okus was a small hamlet of Okus Farm and a few cottages, separate from Swindon. That settlement has long since been absorbed, and the streets around Okus Road now read as a suburb that grew in layers. A suburb built up over several decades has roofs of several ages, sometimes on a single terrace or a semi-detached pair, where one side has been re-covered and the other has not. Mismatched ages cause their own faults. A new tile roof meeting an old one needs the join flashed properly, and a shared ridge or party wall means one owner's repair can show up as a stain on the neighbour's ceiling. Before pricing, we look at how far a repair has to reach and what the next-door roof is doing. On a pair of houses, we also ask whether the neighbour is planning work, because doing both roofs together can save a second scaffold.

More housing was added at the western end of Okus Road in the 1970s. Houses of that period were often given concrete interlocking tiles, shallow-pitched roofs with generous overhangs, and timber fascias and soffits that have now been exposed to weather for fifty years or more. Those are the parts we check first. Ridge tiles may still sit on the original mortar, verges can crumble where the cement has cracked, and the felt beneath the tiles, if it is the old bitumen type, can be brittle and torn at the laps. Flat-roofed garages and porches from the same era are often the first part of the house to leak, long before the main roof needs real work. Many have been extended or boarded over since, so the survey looks at how the layers were added as well as how the top one is holding.

Princess Margaret Hospital was built in phases between 1959 and 1966, closed in 2002 and was demolished in 2004. The site was redeveloped for housing, and three-storey houses and flats are common there. Roofs on tall, modern buildings behave differently from a two-storey semi. Access is harder, so scaffold is a bigger part of any job. Valleys and abutments are more numerous because the footprints are more complicated, and flat or low-pitched sections often sit between the pitched ones. Flats usually share a roof between owners, so a repair may need agreement from a management company or freeholder before work begins.