Roofers in Funtington

The Victoria County History describes cottages in Funtington built of flint and brick, alongside others with seventeenth-century timber framing. A larger house at the west end is flint with seventeenth-century brick dressings and a porch gable carved with the date 1655. A wall like that is a patchwork of different materials, and each one takes in and releases water at its own rate. Flint cobbles are dense and shed water, but the mortar between them is porous, and where a roof slope meets such a wall the junction has to be sealed with lead. The flashing, the answer to that, is a folded lead strip pushed into a cut joint in the wall and laid down across the tiles, so rain follows the metal and not the gap. Sealant smeared along that joint will stop working within a few winters, because the wall and the roof move at different speeds.

A seventeenth-century cottage in Funtington may have a chimney built when the house was, and a stack that old has been rained on for close to four centuries. Its bricks are soft and its lime mortar has been washed out of the outer joints, so the stack gradually loses its grip on itself. Repointing in a mortar of the right strength is one repair; a stack whose bricks have crumbled, or that leans, is another. We look at four things from a ladder and from inside the loft: the pointing, the state of the brickwork, the flaunching, the cement bed that holds the pots, and the lead flashings at the base. A cracked flaunching lets water in beside the pots, and the first sign inside is a stained chimney breast, though the cause is high above.