Roofers in Ifold

Ifold grew out of the estate of Ifold House, built in the early 1800s with over 315 acres of land. From 1931 the plots were sold off, Ifold House was demolished in 1936, and by the 1950s every plot had been sold. Plaistow and Ifold Parish Council tells that story on its history page, and it explains why the place does not look like a village that gathered round a green or a church. It looks like what it is: an estate where each owner bought a plot and built on it. The wider district has far older layers too. The Plaistow conservation area appraisal records the remains of twelve glassworks in the surrounding area, including one north-west of Upper Ifold, so this part of the Low Weald has been worked and built on for a long time.

1.1 Basic dwellings with no mains services

The first owners built basic dwellings, used as weekend or holiday retreats, and none of them had mains services. Any of those buildings may since have been enlarged, rebuilt or lived in all year, and the roof can tell you which. A modest early roof may have been covered, repaired and covered again, with newer material laid over older and little attention paid to the layers beneath. When we survey, we look at what is really up there, because the top coat can be far younger than the structure under it. A stain in one bedroom ceiling may come from a fault in a different phase of the building, perhaps where an old roof meets an extension built decades later.

1.2 Reading a roof one plot at a time

The estate was sold off as separate plots, so nobody can guess what covers your plot from the road. Neighbours with similar-looking houses may have a different pitch, a different covering and a different age. Our roof inspections and surveys page describes what a survey records and the photographs you receive. The verdict that follows is specific to your roof: whether a repair will hold, whether a patch will tide it over, or whether the covering needs renewing, with the reasons set out beside the pictures. That order matters. You see the evidence first and the price afterwards, so you are choosing between real options. On a plot with a detached garage, a workshop or a summerhouse, the outbuilding gets the same attention as the house. A leaking outbuilding roof can ruin whatever is stored beneath it, and a failing sheet or felt is cheaper to deal with early than late.

A house that began as a holiday retreat without mains services may now be somebody's permanent home, with a loft room, a bigger kitchen and a heating bill to watch. That change of use is the setting for any re-roof. Stripping the old covering is the moment to improve the layers beneath it, and the rules about when that becomes a duty are specific.

3.1 When the Building Regulations apply

The Planning Portal's guidance is that you normally need no building control application where less than 25 per cent of the total building envelope is affected and less than 50 per cent of the roof is affected. Chichester District Council's building control team will tell you where your own job falls, and so will a registered building control approver, since private building control has run alongside the council's for years. Under Approved Document L, stripping and re-covering a flat roof membrane counts as renovation; once more than 50 per cent of a roof's surface is renovated, the thermal element must reach the limiting value for insulation. The Planning Portal treats a new covering 15 per cent or more heavier than the old one as a trigger for building control and a structural check.

3.2 Insulation, ventilation and the loft

On new work a roof window must reach 1.4 W/m²K (or sit in Window Energy Rating Band B) while a rooflight is limited to 2.2, according to Approved Document L 2021 Table 4.2; the 2026 edition's Table 3.2 repeats those figures from 24 March 2027. Ventilation is the other half of insulating a pitched roof. For a cold roof with a high-resistance underlay, Marley's guidance calls for a continuous 25 mm gap along the eaves on pitches of 15 degrees or less and 10 mm above that, and a low-resistance underlay has its own conditions, so we read the manufacturer's data sheet before we choose the detail. A bedroom created in the loft of a house with two floors also needs a stair enclosed against fire for the way out. Our roof replacement page explains how a new covering, battens and underlay go on in sequence. If the property has a flat section, our flat roofing page covers the coverings and the falls they need.