A brick double garage in Warrington with a low hipped roof. The mortar along the ridge and hips had broken up, so we lifted the tiles, cleared the old bedding and reset the lines.
This one was a brick double garage on a quiet Warrington close, with a low hipped roof of interlocking pantiles. The slope itself was holding up. It was the top of the roof that had gone — the short ridge and the hips that run down from it towards each corner, where every tile sits on a bed of mortar and nothing else.
Mortar on a hip is the part of a roof that ages fastest. It sits proud of everything around it, it takes the wind and the frost from all sides, and as it dries out it shrinks and cracks. Once a crack runs the length of a joint the tile above it has very little holding it down. The owner had noticed the hip line looking uneven from the drive and asked us to take a look, which is how most of our roof repair work in Warrington starts.
We got a ladder up to the gutter and worked off the slope. Close to, the pantiles were thick with moss and lichen — the garage backs onto trees, so the tiles stay damp and never really dry out through the winter. Growth like that holds water against the mortar joints and keeps them wet, which is half the reason the bedding had broken down the way it had.
Along the hips the mortar was cracked through in places and loose in others, with pieces that came away in the hand. A few of the tiles could be rocked by hand where the bedding under them had crumbled to dust. Nothing had blown off yet, but on an exposed corner like that it is only a matter of the right gust.
The tiles came off the ridge and the hips first, set aside where they would not slide. Then the old bedding was chopped out and cleared right back, along with the debris that had worked its way down between the tile courses. That is the slow part of a job like this, and skipping it is why some ridge work fails again inside a couple of winters — fresh mortar on top of old crumbling mortar has nothing to hold onto.
With the lines clean we checked the tops of the tile courses underneath, then reset the ridge and hip tiles, bedded and pointed in fresh mortar and lined up along the hips by eye from the ground as well as from the roof. The moss came off the slope while we were up there and the clearings went in the gutter's direction rather than down the drive.
You can usually spot this from the pavement. A ridge or hip that dips, a tile sitting at a slightly different angle to the ones either side, or a pale line of mortar crumbs along the gutter after a windy night. Left alone it tends to go one tile at a time.
We cover this kind of work across the town and the villages around it — see our roof repairs page for what else we take on, or the ridge tile re-bedding job we did on a house nearby. If you want someone to look at yours, send us a message and we will come out and give you a free quote.
Tell us what the roof is doing and roughly where you are. We will come and look, and you get a written price before anything starts.
