The roofing variables are the same as anywhere. What Deeside adds is a question nobody else has to ask: which country is the property in, and therefore which rules apply?
Before any of the usual cost variables, Deeside needs one thing settled that no other area we cover does. Deeside is not a town — it is a conurbation of towns and villages including Connah's Quay, Shotton, Queensferry, Sealand, Garden City, Hawarden, Ewloe and Saltney — and it straddles the England–Wales border.
That is not a piece of trivia. It decides which building regulations guidance applies to your roof, which permitted development order is in force, and which council signs the work off.
The Welsh settlements sit in Flintshire. The boundary is not where most people assume — Saltney and Sealand are in Flintshire while being physically continuous with Chester's suburbs, so a street can feel like Chester and be in Wales.
If your property is in Flintshire, the Welsh position set out at the end of this guide applies. If it is on the Cheshire side, see our Chester page, which sets out the English one. We work both sides, so it makes no difference to the roofing — but it makes a difference to your paperwork and to one of the standards.
What does not change is the roofing itself, or the standards the work is carried out to. Slating and tiling is done to the same British Standard on both sides of the Dee.
Area gives you a starting point; what adjusts it is the number of places the roof stops. Hips, valleys, dormers, bay roofs and chimney stacks each add cutting and most need lead, and lead work is slow, skilled and priced by weight.
The conurbation grew around industry, so there is a good deal of twentieth-century housing built to a repeating pattern alongside older property in the constituent villages. The two price differently: estate housing tends to have simple gable roofs with minimal cutting, while older village property carries more detail per square metre.
The genuine unknown on any roof, because nobody can see through a covering. Ask what the rate for defective timber is and whether you will be shown it before it is replaced. Agreed in advance and in writing, it stops being the commonest dispute on a re-roof.
Usually the largest single decision. Natural slate is the highest material cost and slowest to lay; concrete interlocking tile is the lowest of both.
Scaffolding, site set-up and waste disposal barely change with roof size, which is why they weigh most heavily on the smallest jobs. Where a scaffold has to stand on the public footway a licence is needed.
On the estate housing that makes up much of Deeside, whole streets went up to one specification within a couple of years. The fixings, battens and underlay are therefore all the same age across a run of houses, and they reach the end of their working lives together.
So several neighbours needing roofs in the same year is not a coincidence. And because scaffolding, site set-up and disposal barely scale with roof size, doing two adjoining roofs in one visit spreads all three — and removes the awkward junction where new covering meets old.
Deeside is in Wales, and the position is not the same as it is across the border. Planning: section 55 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 applies in Wales as well as England, so a like-for-like re-roof is not development at all and needs no permission. But Wales never adopted the 2015 permitted development order that applies in England — it still uses the General Permitted Development Order 1995, as amended.
Building regulations: regulation 23 of the Building Regulations 2010 applies in England and Wales alike. Where more than 50% of the roof's surface area is renewed, or the work forms part of a major renovation, the roof must be brought up to current thermal standards so far as that is technically, functionally and economically feasible. A patch repair does not trigger it, and neither does a roof over unheated space such as a detached garage.
Tell us the address and we will tell you which regime applies before anything is quoted.
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Complete new roofs, re-roofing and roof replacement across Chester, the Wirral, Deeside and the surrounding areas.
Tell us about the property and the roof in Deeside, and we will come back to you — usually the same day.
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