Medstead
What goes on the roof of a village extension, and who has to be ready before it does?
Medstead's work is mostly back-of-house: extensions, garages and garden rooms, plus the odd old roof
Medstead is a village of farmland, lanes and gardens, a little way off the A31 beyond Four Marks. It has older cottages and farmhouses near its centre, and housing from every decade since spread out among the fields. What it does not have, for the most part, is rows of identical houses. Most properties have been adapted by their owners over the years, with a kitchen pushed out at the back, a garage turned into a study, or a workshop that became a guest room. Those projects are where most of our Medstead enquiries begin, and most of them are about getting daylight into rooms that were not designed to have it.
Because the work is mostly extension and outbuilding work, the person we talk to first is often the builder or the architect, not the homeowner. That suits us. The rooflight in a new flat roof is one of the first things that has to be known, because the roof cannot be finished without it. We try to be the call that gets answered quickly and the email that carries the numbers.
The kitchen that was built at the back
A rear kitchen extension on a village house typically has a flat roof, a pitched roof with a flat centre, or a lean-to against the old wall. The first two take a flat rooflight or lantern happily. The third is more awkward, because a lean-to roof is often shallow and low on the house side, so the glass has to be set to suit both the pitch and the old wall behind it. A roof window made for low pitches, or a flat rooflight on a raised kerb, solves it, depending on the slope.
In an extension the biggest decision is whether the glass is one large unit or several. A single large rooflight over a dining table, fixed in place, gives the most light and the cleanest line. Two smaller ones, one fixed and one opening, give nearly as much and allow warm air to leave. A lantern gives height as well as light, but needs more ceiling depth and more structure. We lay the options out on the plan with their sizes, so that whoever is designing the roof structure can see what each would mean.
Garages and outbuildings becoming rooms
A garage conversion usually keeps its roof, and that roof is often a shallow pitch of concrete tile, a low-slope sheet covering or a flat deck. Sheet roofs and low pitches take a rooflight differently from a normal tiled slope. The rooflight is fixed to a frame built into the roof, the covering is cut and dressed around it, and a new insulation layer on the inside completes the thermal envelope. A conversion that is meant to count as a habitable room has to meet Building Regulations for insulation and ventilation, which your builder or architect will be dealing with. We give them the unit's performance data so the numbers can be checked.
Garden rooms and outbuildings are simpler. They are often built from a kit or by a specialist, with a flat roof in EPDM or GRP and a design that expects a rooflight. The kerb is usually part of the structure supplied. We check its inside dimensions against the unit before ordering, since a kerb built a few millimetres out of square is a nuisance to find on the day.
Cottage and farmhouse roofs near the centre
Around the old centre of Medstead, roofs are clay tile or slate on timber frames of varying age. These are the houses where a conservation rooflight, with a slim black frame and a single central bar, is most at home. They suit the tiles, they sit low and they look right from the lane. They also give the best light for a small bedroom under the eaves, where a larger conventional window would dominate the slope.
Handmade tiles can be brittle, and a roof that has been in place for a century does not always welcome being walked on. The roofer or the fitters will use roof ladders and boards, and spare tiles from the roof itself, kept aside when the opening is cut, are often the best match for making good. We put that into the quote so nothing is a surprise.
Replacing what ageing rooflights have left behind
Plenty of village houses carry an older rooflight that has outlived its performance. A conservatory or porch roof of polycarbonate that has gone cloudy, an acrylic dome on a flat roof, or an early double glazed roof window with a failed seal in a bedroom. Replacement is a neat job when the opening is already there, because the new unit can be ordered from the measured old one. If it is a whole rooflight being replaced, frame and glass, the work is notifiable and we handle the notice to Building Control. If only the sealed glass unit is being replaced, it is not.
Where a failed unit sits on a roof that is otherwise sound, it is worth asking whether the surrounding covering still has a decade of life. Replacing the glass now and the roof in a few years means a second disturbance of the same opening. If the roof is close to renewal, doing both together is cheaper in time and in disruption, and a quote can set out the two options.
Dark landings and bathrooms in the older houses
The older houses in the village often have rooms in the middle of the plan with no outside wall: a landing at the top of a narrow stair, a bathroom fitted into a former bedroom, a corridor to a rear wing. Those rooms are the classic place for a sun tunnel, where a small dome on the roof sends daylight down a reflective tube to a ceiling diffuser. It is a short job when the loft is empty and the tube has a clear run, and it needs no structure to be cut apart from a hole between two rafters.
A tunnel does not give a view, and it gives less light on a dull afternoon than a full window does. For a landing or a cloakroom, the daylight is what matters. For a bedroom where someone will lie and look at the sky, a roof window or conservation rooflight is the right unit. We say at the survey which one the room wants, and it is not always the larger.
Self-builds and larger projects
The countryside around Medstead sees the occasional new house or major rebuild, and on those projects the rooflights are drawn into the design from the beginning. We can work from the architect's drawings, check the sizes against the roof structure and return a quote with the dimensions your frame supplier or carpenter needs. The earlier the dimensions are fixed, the fewer changes the roof structure suffers later, and a lantern or walk-on panel that arrives after the structure is closed is a poor start.
Wind, exposure and where to put the glass
Medstead is open country, and exposed roofs take a hard time from weather. That affects the flashing details and fixings on a roof window, and it affects where large opening rooflights are placed. A rain sensor on an opening unit shuts it as the first drops land, which suits a house that stands empty through the working day. A rooflight shaded by an oak or beech needs occasional cleaning, and the position should allow for reaching it.
Permission, and who decides
Planning applications in Medstead go to East Hampshire District Council. For most houses, rooflights fitted within the plane of the roof fall under permitted development, set out in our planning guide to rooflights. A listed farmhouse or cottage, a property with its rights removed by a past condition, or a new outbuilding in a garden are different cases, and the last is subject to its own rules on size and position. The right step is to look up your address, and we do that before a quote goes out. The council's guidance can be found through the East Hampshire site.
How the order runs alongside the build
For an extension the sequence matters. The builder frames the roof, the roofer waits for the kerb, the glass is made to measure and the electrician has to run supplies before the ceiling closes. If the glass arrives late the roof stays under temporary cover, and if the kerb is the wrong size it has to be rebuilt. So we send the dimensions as soon as the unit is agreed, place the order working back from the day the roofer expects to finish, and pass the delivery date from the maker to you and to your builder as soon as it is confirmed.
After the roofer has finished the covering to the kerb, the fitters lift the glass into place, seal it and check the weathering. The plasterer returns to the reveals, and the electrician finishes any opener or lighting at second fix.
Medstead is a short turn off the A31, 24.8 road miles north-east of the city where we are based, so we can visit the site more than once while the roof is being built.
