UPVC Fascias, Soffits & Guttering Birkenhead

New Roofline in Birkenhead

Birkenhead has street after street of terrace, a good deal of it let and a fair amount of it divided into flats. At eaves level the stock is remarkably consistent: two and three storey frontages, a deep painted fascia, guttering running the length of the block, and a downpipe that quite often serves more than one address.

That consistency is why roofline questions here are as much about ownership as about workmanship. A gutter overflowing across a bedroom window is reported by whoever is inside, dealt with by whoever holds the deeds and paid for under whatever the tenancy or the lease happens to say, and those are frequently three different people.

We quote for whoever is instructing the work, whether that is an owner occupier, a landlord or an agent acting for one, and we will write the quotation so it is clear what is being replaced and where it stops. Roofline Solutions is fully insured and covers Birkenhead and the rest of the Wirral.

Who Is Responsible for the Gutter on a Let Terrace

On a standard residential tenancy, the repairing obligation for the structure and exterior of the building normally sits with the landlord, and guttering is part of the exterior. A tenant is generally expected to report a fault and to allow access for it to be dealt with, not to fund a new roofline. Your own agreement governs it, so anything unusual will be written there and it is worth reading before either side assumes.

Divided houses complicate it further. Where a terrace has been split into flats, the roof and the roofline are usually retained by the freeholder and recovered through a service charge, which can mean a ground floor leaseholder contributing towards guttering they will never see. If you are being asked to contribute you are entitled to know what the work consists of, and we will set a quotation out plainly enough to serve that purpose.

In practice the person who rings is usually the one who can see the water coming in, and that is fine by us. We will look, say what the roofline needs and put it in writing, and the document is yours to hand to whoever holds the purse. What we will not do is begin work on a property without the owner’s instruction, however reasonable the request.

Reporting a Roofline Fault in a Birkenhead Terrace

Describe where the water is rather than what you have concluded is broken. Which house, which elevation, front or back, and whether it runs during the rain or carries on dripping afterwards. A drip that continues for an hour after the rain stops is usually standing water in a blocked length; one that only shows in heavy rain is more often a joint or a section overflowing at the back.

Photograph it from ground level, and include one wider shot that takes in the houses either side, because on a terrace the fault is very often next door to the damp patch. Do not go up to look. These are tall frontages, frequently straight onto a pavement or a narrow entry, and there is nowhere sensible to foot a ladder. A clear photograph from the pavement opposite tells us more than a dangerous one taken from a bedroom sill.

Capping Over or Stripping Back in Birkenhead?

The fascias on these terraces are deep, sometimes 250mm or more, and on plenty of houses they are still the original softwood. A board that size has taken a lot of paint over its life and has usually had it, which means the face can look perfectly respectable while the bottom edge tucked behind the gutter has been wet for years without anybody being able to see it.

Capping a board like that is possible and now and then it is the right call, particularly where one house in a row is being done and the new face has to relate to what sits either side of it. But a deep capping board carries a deep gutter on brackets screwed through it, and the whole thing rests on what those screws finish up in. We check first, and where the answer is rot we say that the honest job is to take it back. On a rented property that distinction matters more than usual, because the cheaper job is the one that comes back round in a couple of winters and lands on the same owner again.

Guttering and Rainwater Goods in Birkenhead

Shared downpipes are the Birkenhead detail. One pipe commonly takes the water off two or three properties, either at a party wall or down the back entry, and that pipe belongs to nobody in particular right up until the moment it blocks. Renewing your guttering while leaving a shared pipe packed with years of grit moves the problem along the row rather than dealing with it.

Rear elevations onto an entry bring the other problem, which is access. The pipe may be fixed to your wall while the ground it stands on is not yours at all. We will look at what can actually be reached and say plainly if the job needs a neighbour’s permission, because that conversation goes far better before the work is booked than on the morning the van arrives. Where a neighbour will not have it, there is usually still something sensible that can be done on your own side, and we will set out what that is.