Roofers in Birchington

A bungalow has a large roof relative to the size of the building, long runs of guttering, and usually a low, shallow pitch. That combination means water moves slowly, debris collects, and any weakness has plenty of time to work. It also means there's no loft void doing you any favours — on many chalet bungalows the rooms go straight into the roof space, so a leak arrives on the ceiling almost immediately rather than dripping unnoticed into a loft for a season.

Nearly all of them have something flat attached: a garage, a porch, a rear extension, a sun room. A lot of that was built between the sixties and eighties in felt or asphalt, and it is now comfortably past its design life. Fibreglass is the obvious answer and it's most of what we do here.

Then there's the exposure. Birchington faces north across the estuary with Minnis Bay and Epple Bay open to the weather, and the western end of Thanet gets the wind coming across flat, open ground with very little to break it. Shallow-pitched roofs and high winds are a poor combination: wind gets under the tiles at the verge and lifts them. After a serious blow we get a lot of Birchington calls.

Guttering is the other steady job. Long bungalow runs sag between brackets over the years, joints pull apart, and water ends up down the wall rather than in the downpipe.

This one is worth reading if you've got a bungalow garage or extension with a tired flat roof, because it shows what often turns up once the old covering comes off.

We stripped the roof back and found the joists needed reinforcing before anything else could happen. Plenty of firms would have laid a new covering straight over the top, taken the money and left the real problem underneath — where it would carry on getting worse, now hidden under a roof that looks new.

We reinforced the joists, re-decked it and finished in fibreglass. That's a roof with decades in it rather than a few years.