Roofers in Turriff

Farms, steadings and outbuildings

Within a few miles of Turra there are more agricultural roofs than domestic ones, and they fail differently. Fibre cement sheeting goes brittle with age and cracks around the fixings. Old steadings still carry their original slate, often on timbers that have not been looked at since the building stopped being used for what it was built for. Barns and machinery sheds lose sheets in a gale because the fixings have worked loose rather than because the sheet failed.

Two things to be clear about. Any sheeting from before the mid-1980s may well be asbestos cement, and that is not something to break up, walk on or dispose of yourself — it needs handling under control and taking to a licensed site. And nobody should be walking an old sheeted roof without crawling boards; fragile roofs kill several people a year in the UK. We will tell you what your roof is before we price it.

We will tell you what your roof is made of before we price anything, and arrange proper, licensed handling where that is what the job needs.

In the town

Turriff itself is a mix — granite and harled property around The Square and Main Street, inter-war housing along Balmellie Road, and modern estates on the edges. Being ten miles inland it gets less salt than the coast and more frost and lying snow, so the faults skew differently: frost damage to saturated stonework and flaunching, moss on north-facing pitches that stays wet all winter, and gutters pulled off their brackets by snow sliding off a slate roof.

Snow load and gutters

That last one is worth spelling out. A slate roof sheds a heavy fall of snow all at once, and it takes the gutter with it if the brackets are at the standard spacing and screwed into a soft fascia. Round Turriff we set brackets closer than the minimum and fix into sound timber, replacing the fascia where it will not hold. It is the sort of detail that never gets noticed until the winter it matters.