Roof restoration and repairs in Birkenhead

Roofs on Birkenhead homes

Birkenhead's streets of old cottages and villas sit right next to the Port River.

Birkenhead is about 14 km north-west of the CBD, in the City of Port Adelaide Enfield. Port Adelaide Enfield covers the historic port and seaside suburbs like Semaphore, Largs Bay, Birkenhead and Exeter, with their old cottages and villas, the beach suburbs of the Lefevre Peninsula, post-war homes in Enfield, Klemzig and Windsor Gardens, and newer communities at Lightsview, Northgate and Oakden. Salt air off the gulf and the Port River makes corrosion the main enemy of metal roofs here.

Popular roofing jobs in Birkenhead

• Iron re-roofs on cottages and villas in the historic port and seaside streets
• Replacing rusted sheets, fixings and gutters near the water
• Restoring tiled roofs on post-war homes
• Repairing the join where an older roof meets a rear extension

What Birkenhead roofs have to cope with

Many older homes in Birkenhead have corrugated iron roofs, front verandahs and box gutters, or terracotta tiles on interwar bungalows. Iron rusts first at the laps and fixings, box gutters block and overflow, and the join between the original roof and a rear extension is a common leak point. In historic areas, like-for-like iron in a traditional profile is usually the simplest path.

Before you book

Check three things before you book roof work in Birkenhead. First, the licence: anyone contracting for building work in SA needs a building work contractor's licence, and jobs of $12,000 or more need a written contract. Second, approvals: repairs, restorations and like-for-like re-roofs usually don't need them. Parts of the City of Port Adelaide Enfield are within Historic Area or Character Area Overlays under the Planning and Design Code. Like-for-like repairs are rarely an issue, but changing the roof's material, colour or shape where it can be seen from the street may need development approval. Third, what's on the roof: solar panels have to come off for most restorations and re-roofs, and an old grey fibre-cement roof may contain asbestos, which needs a licensed removalist for anything over 10 square metres.