Flat roofing in Oakham

Rutland is full of low, wide, flat-roofed things that are not houses: stable blocks, tack rooms, workshops, garden rooms, summer houses and the single-storey ranges tacked onto the back of a hundred village cottages. They are the buildings people struggle most to get a roofer to turn out for, and they are a good part of what we do across LE15.

Outbuildings are proper jobs

A stable or workshop roof gets treated as a nuisance call by plenty of firms, so it gets patched by whoever is nearest with a tin of something. We would rather do it once. We re-roofed a timber garage in concrete tile and re-covered the summer house flat roof beside it in torch-on felt on the same visit, which is exactly the sort of pairing that avoids paying twice for someone to travel.

Big spans and standing water

The thing that catches these buildings out is size. A wide flat span built cheaply decades ago often has barely any fall in it, so water sits rather than runs, and a covering that would last thirty years on a pitched fall is asked to sit in a puddle instead. Where that is the problem we will say so, because re-covering a roof that ponds simply buys you the same failure again. Sometimes the answer is firring the deck to build a proper fall in before anything goes on top.

EPDM rubber and torch-on felt

EPDM goes down as a single sheet across the field of the roof, so on a simple rectangle there is no seam in the middle to fail and it stays flexible in cold weather. Torch-on is a layered system bonded with a gas torch under a mineral cap sheet, and it suits a roof cut about with upstands. On a large agricultural span the practicalities of getting rolls up there can decide it as much as the roof shape does.

The deck first

A new covering over soft boarding is money thrown away. Where the deck has gone we replace it, and we say so when we quote. 10 year guarantee, insured throughout.