Replacing Roof Costs

[xanthe]

Back again having semi-sorted the walls issue - got a specialist out to have a look and quote etc

Unfortunately he wasn't able to do the chimney and roof for me. So would be very grateful for a bit of advice on potential costs for these.

The house is at least 400 years old and the roof is handmade plain clay tiles. The front half is a plain gable, the back is a catslide and then there is a hipped roof over a small 1970's kitchen extension. Also a very poorly built 70's dormer with flat roof on the catslide. There is no ridge-beam.

Roof is fixed to timber battens with bituminous roofing felt underneath. There is no ventilation to the roof at all. Insulation is rigid insulation board that has been pushed in fully between the rafters with no gaps.

A good 30% of the tiles are broken, slipped and/or spalling including ridge tiles. The ridge tiles have been mortared with Portland cement as have the verges. The roofing-felt is rotted away at the eaves and the gutters/pipes are corroded and need replacing. There is evidence of water ingress at one point in the ridge, but minor at present.

The top of the chimney is in a dire state and needs rebuilding and repointing. Lead flashings all need replacing and the valleys and the flat roof are an unknown at present.

The surveyor (specialist in timber-framed buildings) has recommended that we should basically strip the whole roof, install a membrane, install insulation and nail battens to the rafters to allow ventilation (if I understood correctly), then retile with what can be saved mixed in with either reclaimed or new hand-made tiles. He'd also like us to redo the dormer if possible as the construction is appalling and the design is not in keeping with the house (no LB permission on it and LBO would like it replaced with something more sympathetic).

I'm not sure how to calculate the roof area - I did count the tiles on the smaller roof at the front and there were approx 1800! It's not a big house, but catslide roofs add a heck of a lot of acreage!

As we were wanting to negotiate on our final offer asap, I called a couple of builders who I know do this kind of work - one of whom has retiled my parents similar age cottage but a long time ago. Neither work in the area, so there is no incentive for them whatsoever.

The advice I was given was that if 30% of the tiles looked bad just from peering at photos and out of the window, then you could call it at least 50% by the time the roof was stripped and that a complete re-roof would be more economical in the long-run than endlessly patching.

Just based on what I said and a few photos, I was advised that it would be at least £20k to do all the work and possibly more like £30k by the time we'd encountered all the unknowns and including scaffolding and using a builder who knows a bit about C16th buildings.

We are in SE England in a pretty expensive kind of area.

I checked back with the surveyor and he said that £20-£30k sounded about right to him.

Does this sound utter madness and it should be more like £10k or is it correct ballpark? We don't want to under-negotiate, but also want to be fair to the sellers.

 

[malcolm]

We've had quotes to strip, fit a membrane, and re-fit existing tiles on a large 4 bed sized late Victorian (ish) house. Plus realign gutters and replace all leadwork on roof and three bay windows. They've come in between £13k and £20k inc vat plus scaffolding at around £5k. New cast iron gutters aren't cheap - that would add a good £5k so the estimate looks in about the right ball park.

 

[Lime]

My experience of re-tiling a conventional slate roof about 10 years ago is get as many quotes as you can and ask the cheapest few to give examples of their work so you can enquire about their competence and working skills.
Prior to getting quotes I asked several neighbours in the road who had recently had their similar-looking roofs done about the costs and their experience.
Their costs varied between £8000 and £16,000, 2 of them said they never would employ their roofers again and one bitterly regretted having their old tiles replaced with synthetic.
I obtained about 7 or 8 quotes of which most were about £10,000.
The cheapest, £3000, (yes, that is a three) came with the best of recommendations and after further enquiry I employed them.
They re-used slates where the could and I'd estimate they replaced about 40%, with reclaimed tiles making up the difference.
I don't regret anything, save the scaffolders (not the roofers but another firm) were a bit gung-ho and careless of my paintwork.

The message is, don't make a judgement on price, make it on enquiry of their work and don't think the most expensive is going to be the best.

 

[MatthewC]

I had my slate roof re-done 4 years ago (is it really that long?). The 1840-ish limestone house is a semi having a complicated ridge with two right angles, giving three hips and there's a shared box gutter plus three chimneys (see the early entries on my blog - blue spot on right). The total cost was £13k which included cast RWG, soffits, fascias, chimney work and lots of lead work; I didn't find the cast iron RWG that expensive, at £1,600. I was lucky that the bad slates, cemented hips and rotten battens were actually on good sound rafters (possibly because of the ventilation due to missing slates!). We used reclaimed welsh slates which seemed pricey but were about half the cost of new, and the 30% allowance for non re-use was nearer 50%. I was advised not to mix old and new as the new stand out too much. I also found the sub-contracted scaffolders a bit of a pain...

I picked some local firms and asked for a quote then made a judgment when talking to them, followed by looking at some of their work locally. One benefit of being in a small town in the country is that local contractors have to protect their reputation. One interesting point was that nearly all my contractors wanted to know if I was developing the place (with a view to re-sale) or going to live in it. When they heard it was the latter they applied a higher standard, e.g. not using a slate which had a non-visible crack.

I don't know how much your tiles would cost, but your roof certainly seems a bit more than mine so upwards of £20k sounds a good starting estimate.

Matthew

 

[xanthe]

Thank you, all very helpful.

It's a tricky one to size up because of the cat slide - house is 3 storeys - front comes down to top of second storey but back is right down to half-way up the ground storey. Then the hip on the kitchen means valleys and the dormer and whacking great chimney (not perched on top but sticking up half-way up the catslide means lots of fiddly bits. Hence all the online size calculators aren't very helpful.

My best estimate (by counting) is around 8,000 tiles!

Before we do the actual work we will have a load of quotes, but don't want to under negotiate on what we pay for the house.

 

[discobarry]

We had our roof re-done when we moved into our g2 listed house. Maybe the roof isn't as big as yours is but we had the roof totally re-done including 2tons of new roof stone and lead flashing re-done and two velux windows(eek) for about £7000-£7500.

This is a small pic of our house for an idea of size, we are the long roof and up to the middle chimney.

 

[xanthe]

Thank you!

That looks about the same size of property - we have a catslide and small hipped roof and an extension, but no veluxes to contend with, so that sounds not too dissimilar.

We've decided to go ahead and buy the property and while we haven't negotiated quite what we wanted off the purchase price, we've got a reasonable deal and frankly there was nothing similar on the market without spending a vast amount more in the first place.

With any luck, once the wretched solicitors have done their stuff, we should be moving in the New Year - at which point I will no doubt be back here!