Natural slate re-roof · 2025
Victorian stone terrace re-roof
A four-bedroom stone terrace off Middlewood Road had lost dozens of slates over three winters and was letting water into the back bedroom. We stripped it back to the rafters, replaced eleven metres of rotten wall-plate, and re-hung the whole roof in natural Spanish slate with new code-4 lead valleys.
Job sheet
- Location
- Hillsborough, S6
- Scope
- Full strip, re-timber & slate
- Materials
- Spanish Del Carmen natural slate
- Duration
- 7 days
- Slates laid
- 2,140
- New timbers
- 11 m
- Guarantee
- 20 yr
Before
Cracked and slipping Welsh slate, moss-clogged valleys, water staining the rear bedroom ceiling and a sagging ridge line.
After
A crisp new slate roof with hand-dressed lead valleys, dry-fixed ridge and copper snow guards over the front door.
What we found once the scaffold was up
The wall-plate had gone soft along eleven metres of the rear elevation, fed for years by a valley gutter that was blocked with moss. Nothing visible from the pavement, and nothing a survey from a ladder would have found either.
How it was built back
Re-hung to BS 5534 with every slate twice-nailed and mechanically fixed rather than nailed and hoped. The party-wall junction got hand-dressed code-4 soakers in place of the cracked cement fillet that was there. We used Spanish Del Carmen because it weathers to the same blue-grey as the Welsh original still on next door, so the terrace reads as one roof rather than a patch.