Replacing flat roof plus double glazing - borrowing advice needed!

Mr-Ewan

Hi everyone,

I've been a regular reader of this site and forum for quite a while, and seen the fantastic support advice that you folks regularly give out :T , so it occurred to me that you might be just the people to ask for a bit of advice. It's partly financial and partly practical - I'll try and keep it brief:

Flat roof: Ours is broken. We live in a small terrace house, where the kitchen and bathroom together form the ground floor extension with a flat roof over it. When we moved in 5 years ago, the previous owner said she'd last had it fixed about 3-4 years before that. It's now started leaking a <i>lot</i> - we've got buckets around and are unable to use the lights in the kitchen or bathroom. I climbed up and attempted to repair above where the water was coming in, but to no avail - there appear to be cracks all over the thing.

<b>Windows:</b> Our bathroom is already double-glazed, and being such a small house this only leaves 5 remaining windows. The frames have been in pretty poor condition since we arrived (one of those jobs that you plan to get round to at some point but never quite do... :rolleyes: )but it's suddenly become quite urgent: the window pane in the front bedroom now rattles and the curtains blow when the window's shut. Since the pane is both large and directly above the pavement (we have no garden/drive) we're in danger of killing someone if we don't sort it soon! Like I said, though, the other windows (and doorframes) are pretty poor too, and given the problems with noise that we have, now seems to be the time to get the lot sorted at once.

To summarise: it's fairly urgent that we sort out both problems. We're both earning a reasonable wage - nothing outrageous but nothing horrendous either - and, like good MoneySavers, recently started our regular savings account. But there isn't nearly enough to cover this, so we've decided to borrow. We're confident that we can afford the repayments and this shouldn't be a spiralling-debt situation, but we of course want to make sure we do it in the best way.

So, that's the scenario - thanks for bearing with me so far!

My questions are:

1. What's the best way of choosing a roofer, and a roof product? We had a recommendation but all numbers were unobtainable. I'm very interested in looking at one of the non-felt rooves like TuffDek or something - these have no seams to decay, and come with up to a 25-year guarantee, which is great for us and for the price of the house when we move on or remortgage. Does anyone have any experience of these?
2. Double glazing - how on earth do you cut through all the rubbish and marketing, and find a trustworthy double glazer who'll give you a good price? How do you know it's a good price? And can you suggest anything I ought to be looking out for?

And in terms of how to finance the thing:

1. We're hoping (perhaps optimistically) that we can get both jobs done for a total of around £3,000-£4,000ish . Unsecured loans for that kind of amount seem to be really expensive, especially given that it's important to us to stick with an ethical lender e.g. Smile/Co-op . How to go about getting the best rate? Would it make a difference that we've already got our accounts with Smile?
2. Ideally we'd like to be able to pay it off as quickly as possible - standard monthly repayments of maybe £150, but also throw any extra money at it whenever we can, to pay the whole thing off early. Am I right in thinking that this is really hard to do nowadays?
3. Credit cards - having applied for them purely in order to do nifty balance transfers a few years ago, I've now got a Virgin credit card with an available balance of £6900 and a Bank of Scotland one with an available balance of £4350 . There's no outstanding debt on either. Might it be worth seeing if I could spend on one of these, then shift the balance to a new one for a lower rate plus flexible repayment? What are the dangers in that?
4. Extending the mortgage - we're currently locked into a fixed period of our RBS mortgage, with 2 years left. So, one option might be to apply to RBS to extend the mortgage to cover this. It's not ideal since I'd rather pay off this money in much less than 20 years(!) but since we'll be following Martin's advice and remortgaging in a couple of years anyway, perhaps this might be a good option? Obviously we'd end up owing more on our mortgage, but on the other hand the increased house value (from having perfect windows, doors and roof), compared to the amount we owe, might still mean that we could get a decent remortgage rate. Any thoughts on that?
5. Any other tips / words of wisdom / personal stories about any of this?

Huge thanks in advance. I've utterly failed in my aim to be brief, but at least I've covered all the issues we're pondering. But please do ask any questions and I'll answer as honestly as I can. And finally, I hope this doesn't seem too rude, coming in and straight away asking for your help - it just occurred to me late last night that this was the perfect place to ask.