Can I Replace an Old Roof During a House Renovation?

Yes — and on the late nineteenth-century terraced housing that makes up much of Flint, the roof is usually the first thing that should happen in a renovation.

What is worth more attention than the sequencing, though, is the stage before it: what you can establish about a roof while you are still deciding whether to buy the house.

Before You Commit

The roof is the part of an older property with the largest genuine unknown, and it is unknown to the seller too. It is also the item buyers most often under-budget for.

What a survey will and will not tell you

A homebuyer's report will comment on a roof nearing the end of its serviceable life, and that phrase is meaningful — act on it. But the assessment is usually made from the ground and from a brief look in the loft, not from on the roof, and it will not tell you what the battens or the rafter ends are doing.

If the report flags the roof and you intend to proceed, a specific roofing assessment before exchange is worth the cost. It turns “the roof may need attention” into a figure you can negotiate with.

What to check yourself

Five minutes at a second viewing, with a torch:

• Daylight through the covering. A few pinpricks at the eaves may be ventilation. Light across the roof means covering and underlay are both compromised.
• The underlay. Old bitumen felt goes brittle and tears, especially at the eaves. Torn underlay is the difference between a slipped slate being an inconvenience and being a leak.
• Damp staining on the rafters, and whether it feels wet now or historic.
• The rafter ends where they meet the wall plate — the first place to soften, because that is where a failing gutter deposits water.
• The insulation. Thin, flattened or absent tells you what the thermal upgrade will involve.

And ask the seller for paperwork

If any roofing work has been done there should be a building regulations compliance certificate and possibly a guarantee. Guarantees are sometimes transferable. Their absence is not damning on an older house, but their presence is worth having.

Once You Own It: the Roof Goes Early

Everything that follows is vulnerable to water from above — plaster, decoration, flooring, joinery, electrics. Roofing is also the trade most exposed to weather, so it needs somewhere in the programme to absorb a bad fortnight.

There is a second reason. The strip is the only opportunity anyone will have to see the roof structure. On a terrace of this age, finding a soft rafter end or a bowed purlin before the plasterer arrives is worth a great deal.

What a Terrace Adds

Access

Where there is no way to the rear, everything — scaffold components, materials and all the waste coming off — moves through one route. That does not add a phase; it adds time to all of them.

The party line

If only your section is being re-covered, the junction where new meets old has to be weathered properly — soakers or a secret gutter, not a bed of mortar. Small cost, common source of later leaks, and it will not appear on a quotation unless you ask.

The neighbours

Scaffolding against a shared elevation, noise, a skip and deliveries all affect the people either side. Where work involves cutting into or rebuilding above a party wall — a chimney stack on the party line, for instance — the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 may require notice.

The Scaffold Is Where the Savings Are

A scaffold erected for the roof can also serve chimney repointing, rendering, pointing, upper-floor windows, and the fascias, soffits and guttering. Ask every contractor on the project whether their work needs access above ground floor, and arrange them into one scaffold period behind the roofer.

Erecting a scaffold twice on the same house is one of the commonest wasted costs in domestic renovation, and on a terrace with a footway licence involved it is worse than usual.

Budgeting for What Is Underneath

Nobody can see through a covering, so no contractor can price the timbers in advance. What can be agreed in advance is the mechanism:

• Agree the rate for defective timber, in writing, before work starts
• Agree that you will be shown what is found and told the cost before it is put right
• Carry it as a budget line rather than as a surprise — on a house of this age something usually turns up
• Ask for photographs of the exposed structure

The Regulations in Wales, in Brief

Flint is in Wales, and the position is not the same as it is across the border. Planning: section 55 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 applies in Wales as well as England, so a like-for-like re-roof is not development at all and needs no permission. But Wales never adopted the 2015 permitted development order that applies in England — it still uses the General Permitted Development Order 1995, as amended.

Building regulations: regulation 23 of the Building Regulations 2010 applies in England and Wales alike. Where more than 50% of the roof's surface area is renewed, or the work forms part of a major renovation, the roof must be brought up to current thermal standards so far as that is technically, functionally and economically feasible. A patch repair does not trigger it, and neither does a roof over unheated space such as a detached garage.

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