Garage Roofs in Manchester

What your garage roof is made of, and why it matters

There are three common builds round here and they fail three different ways. The ordinary brick garage has timber joists spanning wall to wall, boarded over, with felt on top. The sectional concrete garage, put up in thousands across the estates in the sixties and seventies, is precast panels bolted together with a light roof dropped on, and those panels have a life of their own. The third is a frame with corrugated sheeting bolted straight through it. Which of the three you have decides whether we are talking about a covering, a covering and timber, or a shell that is not worth spending on.

How they fail, in the order it happens

The edges go first. A garage has very little in the way of eaves, so the covering turns over a bare timber edge at the front and up the wall head at the back. Those two lines take all the weather. Water getting in there travels sideways into the boarding rather than dripping straight down, which is why the wet patch appears a foot or two in from the wall. Next it reaches the joist ends. On most garages the joists are built into brickwork with no damp course, so they sit in the wettest part of the structure and rot from the buried end where nobody can see. Then the roof settles and water collects where it never used to.

How to check yours without going up there

Shut the door on a bright day and stand inside while your eyes adjust. Daylight along the top of the walls means the covering has pulled back at the edge. Look at the underside of the boarding for dark staining and sagging between the joists. Poke gently at the joist ends with a screwdriver where they enter the brickwork, because sound timber resists and rotten timber does not. On a sectional garage look along the panel joints and at the up and over door frame, which often carries the front of the roof. What we would rather you did not do is climb up for a closer look, because garage decks give way without warning.

What it costs you to leave it

Whatever is stored under it, first. Then the boarding, which goes from a repair to a full deck once it has swollen and lost its grip. Then the joists, and once their ends have gone we are into carpentry and making good the wall head. On a sectional concrete garage there is a blunter point. If the panels are cracking, the door frame has dropped and the base is breaking up, a good new roof on top is money into a building on its way out, and we will say so.

The garages Manchester has, and where they are

Out through Eccles, Urmston and Flixton the interwar semis gained a brick garage down the side in the fifties and sixties, the roof tucked under the house eaves and draining to the back of the plot. The estates around Irlam and Cadishead came with garage blocks and detached sectional concrete garages, well past the age their original roofs were meant to reach. And a good number of older brick garages carry corrugated sheeting rather than felt.

Older sheeting and asbestos cement

A lot of garages put up between the fifties and the early eighties were roofed in corrugated cement sheeting, and a great deal of that is asbestos cement. You cannot tell for certain by looking, and the only way to be sure is a sample tested by a laboratory. Left alone and in one piece it harms nobody. The harm comes from breaking it up, drilling it, cutting it with a power tool or dropping it off the roof, all of which release fibres that would otherwise stay locked in the cement. It is not general waste either, so it cannot go in a skip. Our position, plainly: we do not remove asbestos cement sheeting. Not carefully, not any other way. If that is what yours turns out to be, Dave tells you straight, and the next step is a test and then a firm that does that work and can show its training and waste paperwork.

How we put a garage roof back properly

The old covering and any soft boarding come off, and we look at the timber first, because that settles a recover against a rebuild. Joist ends rotted where they sit in the wall get cut back and made good rather than covered over. We build a fall in so the water goes somewhere on purpose, then form a real drip at the front edge so it leaves clear of the wall and the door. Where the garage is attached, that join gets a dressed flashing into the brickwork rather than a bead of sealant. Then the new covering, and a gutter sized for what drains into it. All of it is on the free written quote before we start.

Repair or replace, and what moves the price

A repair is right when the timber is sound and the fault is at an edge, a lap or the wall head. That is a small job and worth doing. Replacement is the answer once the boarding is soft over much of the roof, once the joist ends have gone, or once water has nowhere to go. What moves the figure is the plan area, since a single garage and a double are very different jobs, then how much of the deck comes out and whether joists have to be replaced. Being attached to the house adds the flashing detail. What is on there now matters too, because taking the old material away is part of the job and some of it costs more to be rid of. Either way it is priced in writing after a proper look, never over the phone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you just go over the top of the old garage roof?

Only if the boarding underneath is sound and dry, and Dave lifts a corner to check. Covering a soft deck is money spent twice, and we would rather tell you at the quote than after.

I think my garage roof is asbestos. Will you take it off?

No. We do not remove asbestos cement sheeting of any kind. Have it tested, and if that is what it is, get it taken off by a firm that specialises in it. We are glad to fit the new roof once it has gone.

My garage is attached to the house and the damp is on the house wall.

Then the join where the garage roof meets the house is the first thing to look at. That is a different repair from the roof surface, and worth separating from it before deciding anything.

The garage is old. Is it even worth doing?

Sometimes it is not, and we will tell you. If the walls are sound it is nearly always worth a new roof. If a sectional garage is cracking at the panels and the base has gone, you would be putting a good roof on a building that has had its day.

Do I need building regulations approval for a garage roof?

For a detached garage of ordinary size that nobody sleeps in, usually not. An attached or integral garage, or one being converted into a room, is a different question, and building control will answer it in a phone call. We do not self certify this work.