Flat Roof Repairs Wirral

Flat Roofing in Wirral

The Wirral carries flat roofs from every decade of the past century, on garages, rear extensions, dormers, porches and outbuildings right across the peninsula. What a great many of them have in common is not when they were built but what has happened since: they have been covered over rather than replaced, and in plenty of cases more than once. A roof on its third covering is a different proposition from one still on its first, and it needs a different conversation.

It is easy to see how it comes about. An overlay is quick, it makes almost no mess, it is far less disruptive than a strip-out and it genuinely works for a while. So the leak gets covered. Later, the next leak gets covered again by somebody with no idea what is already under there, because nothing about the look of a finished roof tells you how many layers are beneath it. Each new covering hides the one before, and nobody has seen the deck since the building went up.

We do overlays ourselves where the conditions for one are genuinely met, and we say plainly when they are not. Where a roof does come off, it comes off back to the joists and goes back as a new deck with proper falls and an EPDM membrane; the material itself is explained on the EPDM rubber roofing page. Which of the two yours needs is the subject of overlay or strip and replace, and it is worth ten minutes before anybody quotes.

Layer on Layer: What Comes Off a Roof That Has Been Overlaid Twice

The edge gives it away before anything else does. On a roof built up in layers the covering is visibly thick where it turns over the perimeter, the trim stands proud of the fascia rather than sitting tight to it, and the upstand against the house looks oddly short — not because anybody lowered it, but because the roof surface has climbed towards it a layer at a time. Look as well for a gutter or an outlet now sitting below the level of the roof it is meant to drain, or a door onto a terrace that has lost most of its threshold.

Each layer does three unhelpful things. It adds weight to a deck designed for one covering. It flattens whatever fall there was, because the new material goes on thickest where the old surface was lowest, so water that used to run now sits. And it seals moisture in: whatever was damp on the day of the overlay stays damp, and a deck that can never dry out does not recover, it softens. Blisters on a recovered roof are very often that trapped water expanding in the sun.

What turns up when it finally comes off varies, and it is worth expecting the range. Sometimes bitumen poured between layers and set solid; sometimes boarding laid straight over the original chipboard to level it; sometimes sodden insulation in a cold deck; often joist ends gone dark and soft where they bed into the wall. Occasionally everything underneath is sound and the job gets smaller, and we would far rather find that than the other. One thing worth knowing before anybody starts is that a strip-back on that scale can bring Building Control into it, which is a conversation held on paper in advance and is set out in flat roofs and Building Regulations.

How to Tell a Wirral Flat Roof Has Been Covered Over Before

The most reliable test is underfoot, and it is also the one we would rather you did not carry out yourself. A roof with layers on it tends to feel thick and slightly dead, and then to give somewhere in the middle of a bay where the deck has gone. The surface above can look almost new while that is true, which is exactly why a covering put on recently is no evidence whatever about the condition of the thing it was put onto.

From the ground, count what you can see at a cut or damaged edge, where the layers show as stripes. Check whether the covering steps up as it goes from the fascia onto the roof. Indoors, look for ceiling staining that faded after the last recover and then returned somewhere slightly different, or a room beneath the roof that smells musty in a way which never quite clears. And if the house came with the roof already like that, assume nobody has seen the deck.

Getting to the Roof in Wirral

Strip-outs make a great deal of material. Several coverings and a deck coming off a rear extension fill a skip surprisingly quickly, and all of it comes down by hand or down a chute rather than over the edge. Where there is a drive the skip goes on it; where the only place is the road, the council wants a permit, and that is arranged before the day rather than on it. We sheet what is underneath, and we go over the ground with a magnet at the end, because old felt carries a remarkable number of clout nails.

For getting onto the roof, the difference between the two jobs is real. An overlay on a low single-storey garage can often be done off a tower. A strip at first-floor level needs a scaffold with a proper working platform and a route down for the waste, and scaffolding is quoted separately so it stays visible instead of disappearing into a rate. The other thing a strip needs is honesty about the unknown: nobody can price joists they have not seen, so the quotation says what happens if the deck turns out worse than it looks.

Decks, Falls and Detailing in Wirral

Once the layers are off, the deck sets the standard for everything above it. Boards go down to the ordinary specification, which the EPDM rubber roofing page sets out in full, with anything soft at the wall plate cut out and pieced in rather than boarded over. The part that matters on a roof like this is the looking: it is the one moment in a flat roof’s life when the joist ends are visible, and a new deck laid over timber nobody inspected is simply the next layer in the pile.

Falls nearly always have to be rebuilt, because layers flatten them, and this is the one figure worth carrying away from this page. BS 6229 asks for a design fall of 1:40 precisely so that deflection, construction tolerance and settlement still leave a finished fall of at least the 1:80 minimum, and on a roof that has spent decades carrying extra weight the deflection part is not theoretical. The upstand goes back to its proper height above the new surface as well, which often means cutting a fresh chase rather than reusing whatever the last recover tucked itself into, and the outlet is re-set to the new level instead of being left where the old one sat.