Roof Repairs in Wiltshire

A leak rarely shows up where it starts. Water finds a crack or a lifted tile, then runs along the underside of a batten or down a rafter before it finally drops through the ceiling — so a stain in the spare room can be tracing back to a slipped tile two metres away, or a chimney flashing on the far side of the roof. Chasing the stain instead of the source is how repairs go wrong, so the first job on every callout is finding where the water's actually getting in.

Most domestic leaks come down to a handful of things: slipped or cracked tiles letting rain through underlay that's given up underneath them; flashing that's failed around chimneys, abutments and dormer cheeks — lifted, split, or never dressed in properly in the first place; mortar on ridges and hips that's cracked open after a hard frost; and gutters that are blocked or split, sending water back up under the eaves course instead of away from the roof.

Flashing is where a lot of bad repairs come from — it's fiddly, easy to rush, and too often patched with a bead of sealant instead of properly dressed or welded. We do it properly, including lead welding and torch-on repairs where the job calls for it, which is covered under our hot works insurance.

A repair is almost always a fraction of the cost of a new roof, and done properly it should hold for years, not months. If we get up there and find the roof's genuinely past the point where repair makes sense, we'll say so rather than patch something that needs replacing, and quote for a roof replacement instead.