Yesterday, I noticed our next door neighbour (not the adjoining semi) had the builders in to repair their leaking flat roof over their lounge extension. The amount of debris the builders put on their drive suggested it was a big job. They were back again today.
Nearly all the houses in our road were built to the same specification in the sixties and most have had the same extension since then.
The houses were built with an extended kitchen.
The practice has usually been, if you want to extend the lounge, to get your neighbour to have theirs done at the same time so you share the centre wall as you do in a semi. (Or at least let you do it). It cuts down on cost. We and our neighbour did that. A few others have had it done at different times and the first one not got permission fronm the neighbour to put the wall on the party line. When that neighbour, or a new one wants an extension, the first one won't let them tie in.
This is crazy, as if the second person has an extension at a later date, they can tie in to that wall and not lose any space. Otherwise they both lose space as they each end up with a side wall with a small gap between the two.
This is ours. You can't tell that the bit with the French windows was added in 1976, 10 years after the houses were built.
It's only a small extension to a small house, but you end up with a decent sized 20ft long lounge.
The problems with flat roofs is that they can eventually leak. Some houses in our road, have had the job done twice.
We had ours re- done 25 years ago. It wasn't actually leaking, but I noticed that there were a couple of soft spots in the felt when I'd been up on the roof re-cementing the ridge tiles. So water had penetrated the felt and was rotting the first layer of roofing ply. It took a roofer half a day to replace the damaged ply and re-felt it all. So it wasn't too big a job.
But since then, I've not had that bedroom window or the bathroom window next to it, cleaned by the window cleaner. I can clean the bedroom window, "periodically," by leaning out of the small window, which opens horizontally or vertically. We don't worry about the bathroom window.
The usual practice is that window cleaners put a ladder up to the roof and stand on the roofing felt "with their big boots." Pressure from those 25 times a year, on the fire retardant gravel on the roofing felt over a decade or so, can eventually cause a leak.
If I've needed to get to the guttering, I've always put down a board on the gravel on which to place a ladder.
