Protecting Homes. Defending Coasts.

A family-run business, which means something specific

It means you deal with the people doing the work. There is no call centre between you and the roof, no salesman who will never see the property, and nobody on commission. If we quote it, we are the ones who turn up and lay it — and we are the ones you ring if something is not right afterwards.

It also means we cannot afford to sell anybody work they do not need. This is a small patch and roofing runs on word of mouth. Telling someone their roof has ten good years left is a better long-term business decision than talking them into a re-cover, quite apart from being the right thing to do.

Why we go on about the coast

Because it is genuinely the thing that separates a roof that lasts from one that does not, and because it is invisible. Two roofs can be laid with the same slate, to the same gauge, by people of equal skill, and one of them will be dropping slates in twenty years while the other is barely middle-aged. The difference is usually the nails.

Salt-laden air corrodes plain and galvanised steel fixings inside the slate hole, where nobody can see them and nobody thinks to check. The roof looks perfect right up until the point where it starts letting go of slates in ones and twos across the whole slope — nail sickness. By then there is no repair, only a re-cover.

The prevailing south-westerly does the rest. It finds every edge that was bedded in sand and cement rather than mechanically fixed, and it works at it until something lifts. So we use copper or aluminium fixings, we dry-fix ridges and verges on exposed work, we clip perimeters, and we detail lead with enough cover for rain arriving sideways. None of it is exotic. It is just a decision somebody has to make on the first morning.

How we quote

We come out and look, properly, including the parts you cannot see from the ground. That visit is free and there is no obligation attached to it. Then you get it in writing: what is wrong, what we propose to do about it, what materials we are using and why we have chosen them. If there is a cheaper option that will genuinely last, it goes in the quote as well.

What you will not get is a number guessed over the phone. Anyone who gives you one is either going to change it later or has already decided what corner they are cutting.

The work itself

We turn up when we say we will, we keep the site tidy, and we tell you what is happening each day rather than leaving you to work it out from the noise. We sheet up overnight and never open more roof than we can make watertight the same day — Channel weather is not a surprise to anybody who works here. When we finish, everything goes, including the offcuts and the nails out of the gravel.

We are fully insured, and we are happy to talk through what that covers before you commit to anything.