Chimney Repairs West Kirby

Chimney Work in West Kirby

West Kirby has an unusual amount of single-storey housing for a town of its size. Between the wars and again through the 1950s and 60s the ground behind the front — Grange, Newton, the roads climbing off Column Road, Darmonds Green and out towards Caldy — filled up with bungalows and chalet bungalows on generous plots, and a great many of them are still as they were built. Nearer the station there are older two-storey villas as well, but the bungalow is the roof shape that defines the place.

It is also a roof shape that changes what a chimney job involves. A bungalow stack stands on a single-storey ridge and it is short, because it only ever had to clear that ridge. On a chalet bungalow the rooms in the roof brought dormers with them, and those dormers were frequently built into the same slope as the chimney, a tile or two away from it. The result is a roof where the chimney is the most accessible thing on it and the details packed in beside the chimney are the least.

Roofline Solutions works on all of it: repointing and re-forming heads, aprons, soakers, stepped flashings, back gutters, box gutters and dormer cheek flashings, pots, cowls and bird guards, part rebuilds and stack removals down to roof level. Anything inside a live flue — lining it, sweeping it, or deciding whether an appliance draws properly — belongs to a HETAS or Gas Safe registered installer and a chimney sweep. The two-storey roofs nearby are dealt with the same way as those at Hoylake.

The Easy Stack and the Gutter Beside It

Start with the good news, because it is genuine. A bungalow stack is the least demanding masonry on any roof we work on. It stands perhaps a metre above a single-storey ridge, all four faces can be reached from one platform, and on plenty of these houses a tower or a single lift does the whole job. Where a two-storey stack means a week of access for a morning’s pointing, a bungalow stack often does not. The mistake is assuming the rest of the roof is as simple as the chimney is.

What sits next to it very often is a box gutter. Where a dormer is built into a slope, water coming down the roof above has to get past it, and it does that through a channel running down one or both cheeks. Sometimes that is a proper lead-lined box gutter on a timber sole with an upstand each side and a fall along its length; sometimes it is a secret gutter barely wider than a hand, tucked under the tiles so nothing shows. Where the chimney stands in the same slope, its own back gutter often discharges straight into that channel, so one narrow trough takes the slope above, the dormer roof and the chimney together, and carries the lot to the eaves.

Then it fails, invisibly. It may have been laid flat with no fall, so water stands along it and finds the laps. It may be one long unbroken piece of lead, which will buckle and split as it expands. The upstands may be too shallow for the water actually arriving, or tucked under a wedge of mortar at the stack rather than chased into a joint. And on a planted plot the channel silts up with leaf and moss until it is a border rather than a gutter. What makes it a chimney question is the junction itself: an apron off the stack and a cheek flashing off the dormer can end up two or three courses apart, with no room to dress either properly unless the whole detail is set out as one piece of work. Filling the gap with mortar or sealant instead is what most of the leaks we are called to here turn out to be.

Where the Water Shows Up on a Single-Storey Roof

A bungalow tells you about a leak faster and more accurately than a house does. On a two-storey roof water can run along a rafter, drop onto a joist and appear a good distance from where it came in. In a shallow bungalow roof void there is almost no journey to make, so a stain turns up close to the fault and sometimes within the hour. A leak that appears only in heavy rain and stops soon after it does is about volume, and points at a gutter that cannot cope or has silted up. One that follows driving rain from a particular direction and takes days to dry is about the faces of the stack.

Inside, the marks to look for on a chalet bungalow are at the head of a dormer window, along the line where a sloping ceiling meets the flat one above it, and on the chimney breast below. Outside, sight along the slope rather than looking straight at it: a dip beside a dormer is a gutter that has lost its fall, and a dark green strip down the same line is one holding water. Look for cut tiles bedded in mortar where a lined channel should be, for lead somebody has painted or taped, and at the eaves, because water running down the face of the fascia means the gutter above is not discharging where it should.

Getting to the Stack in West Kirby

This is one of the few places we work where the honest answer to “do we really need a full scaffold” is sometimes no. On a true bungalow with an accessible stack, a mobile tower or a single lift on hard standing will often reach everything, and we would rather say so than quote for access nobody needs. The condition is that the platform has to serve the whole job: if the box gutter, the dormer cheek or the far side of the stack is part of the work, a tower parked in front of the chimney is no use at all.

The plots help and the extensions do not. Gardens here are generally wide with room to stand a base, but bungalows attract single-storey additions, and conservatories, flat-roofed rear extensions, garages and car ports have a habit of occupying exactly the ground a scaffold wants. Those get boarded and propped rather than loaded directly. The other thing worth saying is that a low roof is a tempting roof: many of the bodged repairs we find on these houses were done by somebody standing on the covering off a ladder, and the tiles they broke are part of why it leaks now.

Leadwork, Pots and Cowls in West Kirby

A box gutter is a piece of leadwork with a specification rather than a strip of metal pushed into a gap. It wants a timber sole laid to a definite fall, lead heavy enough to be knelt on and to stand water sitting in it, the length broken into lapped sections with a drip or a step rather than run in one, welted edges where it turns out over the covering, upstands carried well up behind the dormer cheek cladding and chased into a joint at the stack, and an outlet that delivers into the eaves gutter. Get those right and it needs nothing but clearing.

The top of a short stack raises a different question, and it is one we will point you at somebody else for. A bungalow flue is short to begin with, and short flues draw poorly; where a dormer, a roof conversion or an extension has gone up since the house was built, a stack that used to stand clear of everything may now be sitting in the shelter of something taller. Guidance on where a flue has to terminate relative to the roof around it exists for exactly that, and the decision belongs to the appliance installer. What we do is the masonry and the weathering, and on a flue that is finished with, a cap that still lets air through.