Days rather than weeks on site for most houses. What a terrace adds is not roofing time — it is access, sequencing and the people either side of you.
For an ordinary Birkenhead house a complete re-roof is a matter of days rather than weeks on site once the scaffold is up. On a large conservation-area property with three chimney stacks it is longer, and most of that difference is lead work.
But the question people usually mean is broader than the days on site, and on a terrace there are several things that affect the answer which have nothing to do with roofing.
Where there is no way to the rear, everything — scaffold components, tiles, battens, underlay, lead, and all the waste coming off — moves through one route. That does not add a phase; it adds time to all of them, and it is the single biggest programme difference between a terrace and a detached house.
Where the scaffold has to stand on the public pavement, a licence is needed from Wirral Council. On tighter terraced streets this is common, and it is frequently the longest lead item on the whole job — it affects the start date rather than the work, which is why it gets applied for early.
On a street with no drives and controlled parking, this is a real question rather than a detail, and it may itself need a permit. Worth settling before the start date.
Scaffolding against a shared elevation, noise during the strip, a skip outside, and material deliveries all affect the people either side. You are not obliged to tell them for straightforward re-covering, but a conversation in advance is worth a great deal — and where work involves a party wall, notice under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 may be required.
| Phase | What happens | Relative length |
|---|---|---|
| Scaffold | Erected a day or two before work starts | Short |
| Strip | Covering, battens and underlay off, in sections | Short and noisy |
| Structure | Inspection; timber repairs if needed | Unpredictable |
| Rebuild | Underlay, battens, covering, ridge, verges | The bulk of it |
| Junctions | Chimneys, valleys, abutments, party line | Slow — and worth it |
| Ventilation and insulation | Eaves, ridge, thermal upgrade | Moderate |
| Finish | Gutters tested, site cleared, scaffold struck | Short |
On Birkenhead's older stock the junction row is a larger share than people expect. A house with two or three stacks has two or three sets of aprons, soakers, step flashings and back gutters to form, and that is slow, skilled work which cannot sensibly be hurried.
A quoted duration noticeably shorter than everyone else's is worth questioning rather than welcoming. The steps dropped to hit a fast date are the invisible ones: a proper structural inspection, correctly lapped underlay dressed into the gutter, lead formed and dressed into the brickwork rather than bedded in mastic, and the party-line junction done properly rather than filled with mortar.
Two separate systems. Planning: a like-for-like re-roof does not materially affect the external appearance of a building, so under section 55 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 it is not development at all and needs no permission. A visible change of covering can be a different matter, particularly inside a conservation area, where the test is applied more tightly.
Building regulations: where more than 50% of the roof's surface area is renewed, or the work forms part of a major renovation, regulation 23 of the Building Regulations 2010 requires the roof to be brought up to current thermal standards so far as that is technically, functionally and economically feasible — 0.16 W/(m²K) for a roof in an existing dwelling. A patch repair does not trigger it, and neither does a roof over unheated space such as a detached garage.
We will tell you what has to happen before we start, and what could extend it.
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