Newmarket Roofers replaces and repairs fascias, soffits, and guttering for homeowners in Girton, working safely from scaffold or tower to protect your roof timbers from water damage.
The fascia is the horizontal board fixed to the ends of your roof rafters, the one that carries the guttering. The soffit sits underneath it, closing off the gap between the fascia and the wall. Between them, they stop rain, birds, and pests from getting into the roof space. When they fail, water tracks back into the timber and rot spreads quickly.
Guttering channels rainwater away from your walls and foundations. A blocked or broken run lets water spill down the wall face, staining the render and eventually saturating the brickwork. None of these components last forever, and uPVC, which replaced painted timber on most homes from the 1980s onwards, typically needs attention after 20 to 30 years.
Any one of these is worth getting looked at before winter. Frost forces water further into cracks, and a saturated soffit board can pull the guttering with it when it finally fails.
Understanding exactly what happens when we come to your home in Girton helps you plan around the work and ask the right questions of any roofer. Here is how a typical fascia, soffit, and guttering replacement runs in practice.
Before any materials are ordered, we inspect the existing boards, the rafter feet behind them, and the guttering run. Rafter feet are the ends of the roof timbers that sit just inside the fascia board. When a fascia has been letting water in for some time, the rafter feet can be soft or partly rotten. If that is the case, they need to be cut back to sound timber and repaired before any new board goes on. Fitting a new fascia over rotten timber is one of the most common mistakes on rushed jobs.
We also check the condition of the guttering itself - whether the falls are correct (guttering should drop roughly 1 in 600 towards the downpipe), whether the joints are sealing, and whether the downpipes are clear and discharging properly at ground level.
Working at eaves height safely means using either a scaffold platform or a properly footed tower scaffold. On a detached house in Girton the scaffold will typically go up the morning of the first day. Before removing any boards, we protect the area below with dust sheets and ensure any plants or garden furniture close to the house are moved back.
The old guttering is taken down first, followed by any existing uPVC or timber fascia and soffit boards. These are removed carefully to avoid pulling tiles or disturbing the felt behind the fascia, which often gets dragged if boards are levered off without care.
With the boards off, the rafter feet are fully visible. Any that are soft, split, or showing fungal decay are cut back to sound wood and spliced or sistered with new treated timber. This stage is where the real condition of the eaves is revealed. On older properties where the original boards were painted softwood, water has sometimes been slowly seeping behind the fascia for years without any obvious sign from the ground.
The sarking felt - the layer of roofing felt that laps over the top of the fascia - is checked and dressed correctly over the new fascia before it is fixed, so water cannot blow back under the tiles at the eaves.
We use uPVC fascia and soffit boards as standard. They do not rot, do not need painting, and carry a manufacturer's colour-stability rating that typically runs to 10 years for standard white and similar for other colours such as woodgrain foil finishes. The boards are fixed with appropriate fixings into sound timber, not just clipped into the old positions. Joints are made with uPVC jointing pieces and end caps for a clean, weathertight result.
Ventilated soffits are fitted where the roof space needs cross-ventilation - building regulations require adequate eaves ventilation on most pitched roofs, and fitting a solid soffit where there was a ventilated one is a mistake that can cause condensation and timber decay in the loft. If in doubt, we fit a ventilated board.
Once the fascia is fixed and secure, the new guttering goes on. We use half-round or square-line uPVC guttering depending on what suits the existing downpipe runs and the look of the property. Brackets are fixed at the correct spacing - typically every 600 mm on the fascia - and the fall is set with a string line before any section is clipped in. Every joint is sealed and tested. Downpipes are connected and, where possible, we check that they discharge clear of the wall base.
Gutter capacity matters more than many homeowners realise. A standard 112 mm half-round gutter handles most average roof pitches, but a large or steep roof section may need a larger 150 mm run. Fitting undersized guttering on a big roof slope will cause it to overflow in heavy rain regardless of how good the installation is.
All old boards, brackets, screws, and offcuts are loaded and removed from site. We walk the perimeter and check every joint, every downpipe connection, and every end cap. If there is a downpipe hopper or shoe at ground level, we make sure it is clear and that water runs freely. The scaffold or tower comes down, and the garden is left as we found it.
These questions will quickly separate a thorough contractor from one who is simply pulling off old boards and screwing new ones over whatever is underneath.
For a typical semi-detached house, a full replacement of fascias, soffits, and guttering in uPVC is likely to fall somewhere between £1,500 and £2,800, depending on the size of the property, the number of elevations involved, how much access scaffolding is needed, and whether any rafter-foot repairs are required. Detached houses with larger eaves runs or complex rooflines will sit higher. Repairs to guttering alone - re-sealing joints, replacing a broken bracket or section - are considerably less, often £100 to £350 for straightforward work.
These are typical current UK figures, not fixed prices. The actual cost depends on your specific property and what is found once the boards come off.
If you can see peeling paint on the fascia, water marks on the wall, or gutters pulling away from the house, do not wait. Call Newmarket Roofers to book a roof survey and we will tell you exactly what needs doing and why.
No obligation · We usually respond within 2 hours
Storm damage, active leak, damaged ridge - we aim to be on-site within 24 hours.
