Roofers in Minster

Minster has genuinely old building stock, including listed properties, and that changes the job. On the older cottages you're often dealing with clay peg tiles, handmade and hung on pegs rather than nailed, sitting on timber that may be centuries old. They can't simply be swapped for a modern concrete tile — the appearance is wrong, the weight is wrong, and on a listed building it isn't permitted. Where we can, we salvage and re-lay the originals and make up the shortfall with matched reclaimed tiles.

The roof structures themselves are rarely regular. Centuries of extensions, alterations and re-pitching leave you with uneven planes, odd junctions and valleys that were formed by hand. Leaks in Minster are almost always at a junction, a valley or an old chimney abutment rather than in the middle of a slope.

The other thing we find a lot here is the legacy of previous repairs. Cement fillets and sand-and-cement bedding were used heavily on older roofs for decades, and they don't move with the building. They crack, water gets behind them, and the crack is often invisible from the ground. Replacing failed cement work with properly formed lead is one of the more common jobs on older Thanet properties — we've written up a Kingsgate job that shows exactly what that involves.

Around the village there's also modern estate housing and the usual flat-roofed garages and extensions, which is straightforward fibreglass work.

This job is the best illustration we have of the problem that turns up again and again on older Thanet properties, Minster included.

The roof had been finished with cement fillets — a common approach for decades, and one that always fails eventually. Cement is rigid, the building isn't. It cracks, water gets in behind it, and because the cracks are hairline and high up, nobody sees them until there's damp inside.

We took out the failed cement and reinstated it properly with materials designed to move with the building rather than fight it. Done once, done right.