Skylight Installation in Stutton

Stutton is a scattered Stour-side village, farm buildings and cottages along the lane with later houses filling in between. The roofs are the giveaway: long unbroken runs of plain tile and pantile, few dormers, very little breaking up the slope. Aesthetically that is why the village reads the way it does. Practically it means a new rooflight is the only thing on the elevation, and anything set out badly is obvious from the road.

Under seven miles from Ipswich, about twenty minutes over the Orwell bridge and down through Holbrook. The lanes are narrow in places but nothing that causes a problem for a survey visit.

Setting out to the tile courses, not to the room

The instinct is to place a rooflight where the room wants it. On a long plain-tile slope that is only half the calculation, because the tiles are laid to a fixed batten gauge and the flashing has to land on whole courses to weather correctly.

Plain tiles are laid double-lapped, with a gauge typically around 100mm depending on tile length and the lap required for the pitch. The head flashing of a rooflight needs a full course above it to lap onto. The side flashings need whole tiles to clip against, and where a course has to be cut, the cut piece needs enough width left to be nailed rather than balanced.

Shift the opening 60mm up or down the slope and you can turn an awkward set of cut tiles into a clean junction. That decision costs nothing at the marking-out stage and cannot be corrected afterwards.

Pantile and plain tile behave differently

Both are common here. Plain tile is small, double-lapped and forgiving in width, harsh in the vertical because of the gauge. Pantile is single-lapped with a big side roll, so the horizontal position matters far more: a side flashing that lands mid-roll rather than in the valley of the profile never sits properly, no matter how carefully it is dressed.

On a pantile roof the sensible move is to align the rooflight width to the tile module so the flashing sits in the same relative place both sides. That is why we measure the actual covering module on site. Nominal tile sizes and installed modules are not the same number once a hundred years of settlement is involved.

Old rural roofs and what is underneath

On the older Stutton stock there is often no sarking felt at all, or a bitumen felt so brittle it tears as soon as it is disturbed. That matters, because the underlay is the secondary weather barrier and it needs to be dressed into the rooflight collar properly.

Where the existing felt is perished we cut back to sound material and patch in a new breathable membrane, lapped correctly over the course below and up to the frame. If the felt across the whole slope has gone, we say so. It does not stop the rooflight going in, but you should know the roof is on borrowed time so the decision about a wider re-cover is yours, made with the information.

• Pitched roof skylight installation is the bulk of the work here, on steep clay-covered slopes.
• VELUX, Keylite and Roto units cover most requirements, with the flashing kit ordered to the covering we measure.
• Flat roof rooflights for the later single-storey additions and garden rooms that are common in the village.
• Energy efficient skylight installation where a cold rural roof space is being converted and Part L applies to the new opening.

Stour-side exposure

Stutton looks onto the tidal Stour. Saline water and open fetch across the channel mean moderate salt loading and regular driven rain on south-facing slopes. That is estuarine exposure, not open sea, and the honest specification is upgraded stainless fixings on the exposed elevations rather than a full marine package. Rural sites also collect more organic debris on the roof, so we check that the flashing side gutters have somewhere for leaf litter to clear.

Old rural roofs, and what might be living in them

Stutton is not one kind of building. Farmworkers’ cottages, larger farmhouses, converted stores and later infill houses sit along the same lanes, and the roof structure varies as much as the age. That is why the survey here starts inside the roof space rather than with the covering, because the timber is the part that decides what a slope can carry.

On the older barns, outbuildings and cottages, opening up a roof occasionally runs into something a suburban job never does. Bats roost in old rural roof spaces, and all bat species and their roosts are protected by law. If a survey finds evidence of a roost, the work cannot simply proceed, and the right course is to pause and take proper advice rather than press on, because disturbing a roost is an offence. It is not common and it is not a reason against a rooflight, but on this kind of stock we look for the signs at survey, because finding out halfway through is far worse for everyone than knowing at the start. The same careful look picks up old birds’ nests and the debris that collects in a barn roof, which has to be cleared from the flashing gutters so water runs off rather than backing up.

Long spans and where the structure allows an opening

The long, uninterrupted slopes that give Stutton its look come from long rafters carried on purlins, and on the bigger farm buildings those spans are considerable. A rooflight has to sit clear of the purlin line, and on a wide slope the purlin often decides the vertical position more firmly than the room below does. Where a slope is long enough that a single small unit would look lost on it, two aligned units set to the structure usually read better and light the room more evenly than one, which is the same setting-out logic that governs where the flashing lands. We survey from inside for this, because the purlin position and the rafter condition are the two things that fix what is possible, and neither shows from the lane.

Access on the scattered stock is usually straightforward, but some properties sit at the end of a farm track, and a scaffold lorry needs firm ground to reach the house. We check the approach at survey so the fixed quote reflects how the roof is actually reached.

How a single fit is programmed here

Most Stutton jobs are one or two units rather than a run of glazing, and on a scattered rural village the programming is worth getting right. Access is set up first, scaffold or a tower depending on the property and the ground, and on the older stock we survey from inside the roof space before anything is ordered so the structure and the underlay condition are known. A single pitched-roof unit into a sound slope is normally a one-day fit once the access is up. A trimmed opening in a hand-cut roof, or a slope where perished felt has to be cut back and patched, pushes it to two. The quote states which, so you are planning around a firm answer rather than a hopeful one, and where the covering or the felt turns out to need more than the rooflight itself we set that out separately rather than folding a bigger job quietly into the price. On this kind of stock the honest version, in writing, is worth more than an optimistic day rate.

Getting a price in Stutton

Every job is surveyed on the roof and priced once in writing, and the number holds unless the specification changes. Ten-year workmanship guarantee, installed to current Building Regulations, by installers with 25 years fitting rooflights behind them.

We cover the same run of villages at Holbrook and Brantham, and over the border at Manningtree. The full coverage is listed on areas we cover.

Request a fixed quote for Stutton. A photograph of the slope from the garden, taken square-on rather than at an angle, tells us the covering and roughly the pitch before we arrive.