In many of our reports, whether Home Surveys or Building Surveys, we frequently emphasise the need for ongoing maintenance of a building, and this is a good example of what can happen when a simple repair is neglected.
In this case, we found two items of repair that had not been attended to and what would have been a quite simple job and relatively inexpensive has led to a much more significant and expensive repair being required.
The two problems here were a missing stop end to a gutter and a couple of slipped tiles, both would have been very easy to make good.
This picture shows a few tiles that have slipped to the edge of the roof.
This shows a missing end stop to the gutters and rot to the eaves joinery.
As a result water has been running onto the fascia and barge board which have now rotted out and need completely replacing.
The problems, however, are likely to have gone much further as inevitably water has been getting in through the slipped tiles and its quite likely that the ends of the rafter to the roof in this area will also now be rotting out.
So instead of simply needing to fix the tiles when they slipped and fixing a new end stop it will now be necessary to strip the roof tiles back and probably replace the ends of the rafters and of course replace the rotten facia and barge board. Clearly this is going to be much more expensive.
The moral here is spend a little now to save spending a lot in the future.