Roof repairs and re-roofing in Holmer Green

Housing in Holmer Green

What the roofs here are like

Holmer Green is a large village on high ground between Amersham and High Wycombe, and it is predominantly 20th-century. A small older core of cottages sits around the common, but the great majority of the village was built from the 1930s onwards and expanded substantially in the postwar decades: semi-detached and detached houses on estate roads, plain concrete tiled roofs, straightforward gables and hips, integral or attached garages. There is a large stock of bungalows and chalet bungalows, many now with dormers or full loft conversions. More recent private development has filled in around the edges, and modern extensions are widespread across the older 20th-century stock.

What we get called out for

The problems that come up in Holmer Green

This is concrete tile country, and a lot of it is now forty to sixty years old - which is where concrete tiles reach the end, losing their cement face, roughening and starting to shed. We do a great deal of assessment here telling people honestly whether they have five years left or fifteen. The chalet bungalows and loft conversions bring dormer work: cheek flashings and small flat dormer roofs are the leak points, not the main slope. Fascias, soffits and guttering come up constantly, since much of the estate housing still has original timber eaves, often capped over at some point rather than replaced.

Working in Holmer Green

Access, scaffold and what affects the timescale

Simple working village: wide estate roads, off-street parking, easy scaffold access and no licences needed in the great majority of cases. Being on high ground, it catches the wind, so exposed ridges and verges take a beating and we get a run of callouts here after every winter storm. Because so much of the housing is the same handful of postwar designs, we can often give you a very close idea of cost from a description and a photograph before coming out. Where a property has been converted into the roof, we will want to see inside as well as outside - dormer leaks rarely show where you think.