Soffits etc

blueflyingtonight

I live in a 4 bed detached house and need to replace the soffits. Currently asbestos & wooden boards etc. Can anyone recommend someone in the Thames Valley/Reading area who would do a good/competitively priced job?

Roughly how much should I expecty to pay? I have had a quote from Zenith which was a joke and and their hard sell tactics made sure they would never get my business!

Thanks

wolfehouse

i had this done (sounds similar to mine) 10 years ago and learned a lot along the way. I chose a builder with 'master builder' and 'fair trade' ads but that did not protect me in the end... was supposed to cost about £1,500 (in 1996) but cost twice that in the end (£3000).

if you replace with wood (what i did) it will cost less but you will have to get them painted every 2-3 years and the cost of this keeps rising and workmen may be hard to find.

Make sure you have vents- my house has cavity wall insulation and this caused problems with no vents.

make sure you get a price for the entire job- my costs doubled because halfway through the builder was sucking his lips and saying bad-very bad about damp...and had to take care of that before continuing. there very well may be some rot (wet?) that you will only find when you open it up.

all the big double glazing companies seem to do roofline stuff- they were very expensive. the quality (thickness) of plastic they use seems to vary greatly so you need to research exactly what you are getting. if i were to do it again i think i would find a local company that could do it and get references- don't know any in your area i'm afraid.

good luck.

alanobrien

Ignore the big companies and go for a local installer.
Expect to pay up to 3k but circa 2k is more reasonable and possible depending on what you have done, i.e. replaced or covered.

I know of a couple of companies in the Slough area that are ok but that may be to far out from your location.
pm me if you want to know who they are.

Depending on how handy you are this is something you can do yourself, i intend to buy some scaffolding and do my own so the scaffolding will in effect be free for any later use i put it to.

nodwah

We got ours done by everest last summer and it was £3300 for a three bed detached: our roof has a particularly big overhang which made it a bit dearer and some of teh boarding was asbestos. The price was agreed at the start but we did have to put up with a lot of hard sell even after we'd made the agreement and they tried to flog us their own finance which I didn't fancy at all. Anyway we're very happy with the result.