The first sound was a ladder scraping our front gutter at 8.35am on Thursday 3 April, and I had been waiting for it, in one way or another, since the survey report landed in October.
The survey had rated the roof a 2 (not urgent, but don't leave it): three cracked or slipped concrete tiles and loose mortar along the ridge. The tiles are the interlocking concrete sort, put on in the 1990s, and the chimney stack with our two unused pots is shared with Maureen. For two months I had looked up at the roof from the pavement every morning and told myself I could see exactly which tiles they meant. I couldn't. Matt wanted to climb up and have a look. I said we don't do roofs, and he agreed faster than I expected, which told me he had already thought about it.
Finding a roofer
Maureen found him for us. I mentioned the survey over the wall and she disappeared into her hall and came back with a number on the back of an envelope. "He's not the cheapest," she said, "but he turns up. Ron always said you pay a roofer once, either in money or in buckets." She has used him for years. I rang that evening, read out what the survey said about the roof, and he said, "That's half a morning." He quoted £260 for the job, tiles and mortar included.
It was the only quote I got. The survey described exactly what he proposed and Maureen's word counted for a lot, so I booked it. Matt had school, so I swapped my Thursday office day with my Friday at home and spent the morning at the back room table listening to people walk over my head.
The morning itself
There were two of them. One went up the front slope on a ladder and hooked a roof ladder over the ridge. The other stayed on the pavement, sending up tiles in a bucket on a rope and keeping the dog walkers out of the way. The cracked tiles came off in pieces. He had a few of the right profile in the back of the van, a shade paler than ours. "They'll weather in," he said, and I'm taking his word for it, because from the road you can already pick out the three.
The ridge was the bigger job. He raked out the crumbling mortar along the top, bedded it again with fresh mortar mixed in a bucket and swept the crumbs down into the gutter, where I'll be fishing them out with a trowel. They were finished by 12.30pm. It stayed dry and breezy, about 9°C, with the sun on the ridge from about eleven.
Afterwards he showed me photos on his phone: each tile before and after, and the old ridge mortar, which looked like shortbread. I paid by bank transfer and the invoice came by text, with the photos attached. A man on your roof where you can't see him is a man you want a photo from, and I was glad of every one.
What he said on the way down
On his way back to the ladder he stopped at the back of the house, at the corner where the gutter meets the gable end, and looked up at it for a while. "That'll want looking at," he said. That was all. No price, no explanation, and I didn't ask, which is the thing I'd do differently. I wrote "back gutter corner" on the list and went to put the kettle on again.
The £260 went on the house tab that evening, in the column I call "found by the survey". It's a smaller column than I'd feared in October.
Brew count: 6.
