Most of the calls I get are for something on the outside of the house that has been left a bit too long — a gutter overflowing in heavy rain, open pointing, a crack in the render, a garden wall that has started to lean. By the time I am there, the small job has often grown. Building maintenance, on a typical house in Brighton or Hove, is that outside work: the roofline, the gutters, the brickwork and pointing, the render, the garden walls, the lead and the chimney. These are the jobs worth keeping on top of, how often I would check them, and the point where a small repair still stops a much bigger one.
What It Covers on a Typical House
Most of the houses I work on are Victorian terraced houses, and other period and character properties, in Brighton and Hove. I am a roofer and a builder, and this is the day-to-day side of the work. Salt air and driving rain off the Channel get into mortar, metal and timber quicker than they do inland, so a house here needs more regular attention than the same building would further from the coast. In practice, building maintenance and property maintenance means building repairs and maintenance to the outside of the house, the parts that keep the water out. The streets in Hove and in Brighton look different, but the jobs are much the same, and we work along the Sussex coast into West Sussex as well.
The Jobs Worth Keeping On Top Of
These are the items I actually get asked to sort on a normal house. They are small on their own. Left alone, they let water in.
- ✓Roof covering and ridges — a slipped, cracked or missing tile, or ridge mortar that has opened up. One gap is enough in driven rain.
- ✓Gutters, downpipes, fascias and soffits — a blockage, a failed bracket, a joint that drips, or a rotten fascia letting the gutter sag.
- ✓Pointing and brickwork — mortar joints on the walls that have recessed, cracked or washed out.
- ✓Render — cracks and blown patches in the coat.
- ✓Garden walls — copings that have opened, cracks running along the mortar, or a wall that is leaning.
- ✓Lead — flashings where a roof meets a chimney or a wall, and lead on a parapet or balcony wall where the old joints are letting water through.
- ✓Chimneys — open joints, a cap that has broken up, or a pot that has shifted.
There is already a guide to gutter repair or replacement, one on chimney repairs and repointing, and a checklist for getting the roof and the outside ready for autumn and winter. Roof covering sits with our roof repair service. Gutters, lead flashings and other leadwork, and chimney repairs, each have their own page. Together they are ordinary maintenance on a house, and they are worth doing while the fault is still small.
How Often to Check
For most houses, a look from the pavement twice a year is enough — once in spring and once in autumn — and again after a proper storm. From the street you can see a slipped tile, a gutter that is dipping, staining on the wall under a joint, and a chimney that is losing its mortar. Gutters are the one I would deal with before the wet months. Once the leaves are down, clearing a run is a much smaller job than drying out brickwork that has had water down it all winter. If you would like a roofer to go over the roof itself, I have written separately about why an annual inspection is worth it.
When a Small Repair Stops a Bigger Job
A small repair is the right job while the material around the fault is still sound. Reseating a tile, re-bedding a short length of ridge, refixing a gutter bracket, raking out and filling a patch of open joints, or cutting out a blown section of render and making it good: that is the maintenance work, and it is usually straightforward. Leave the same fault and the job changes. Open pointing lets rain into the brick, and a winter of frost then takes the face off it, so you are cutting bricks out as well as filling joints. A crack in the render lets water behind the coat, and the blown patch spreads. A gutter that overflows wets the wall underneath, and that is where a lot of the damp I see inside these houses actually starts.
Garden walls follow the same pattern. If a front wall is leaning, or the cracks run along the mortar, the trouble is often in the footings under it. Filling the crack and leaving the base is how that wall ends up coming down. On a terraced house in Brighton, the footings under the front garden wall had failed. The wall was leaning, the brickwork had cracked along the mortar, and a patch would not have held. We took the wall down, put in new concrete footings, rebuilt it to the original line and finished it with a sand-and-cement scratch-coat render, ready for the owner to paint.
Water from a gutter, a crack in the render or a patch of open pointing can travel through the wall and show up as a mark on a ceiling, sometimes well away from where it got in. Putting the outside right is often what stops the mark coming back. If you are not sure where it is getting in, that is a sensible reason to ask someone to look.
If you want the outside of the house looked at, and a straight answer on what is worth doing now and what can wait, that is what our building maintenance service is for. No job is too small. The quote is free, there is no call-out charge, we are fully insured with full public liability, and the price is set out honestly before any work starts. We cover Brighton, Hove and the wider Sussex area. Get in touch with Kirby's Building & Property Maintenance Ltd through the contact page, or call 07740 182032.