What is best to replace a garage roof?

A garage roof only gets replaced once a generation, so the covering you choose and the deck you fix it to are worth getting right first time.

Wey Valley Roofing is family-run, fully insured with Public Liability Insurance, and its own experienced local roofers do the work, never subcontracted strangers. Whether you need garage roofing or garage roofing services Godalming, we cover Surrey and the Wey Valley, and every job carries a 25-year written workmanship guarantee.

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What is best to replace a garage roof?

For most garages, the best replacement is a single-ply EPDM rubber membrane or a GRP fibreglass laid over a sound, correctly falling deck, with felt or torch-on still a fair choice on bigger spans. Pitched garages take tiles or slates, and metal sheet suits long, exposed runs. The deck and the falls matter more than the covering.

The deck under the covering decides how long the new roof lasts

Almost every garage roof we strip has been failed twice: once by the covering and once by the boards underneath it. Chipboard soaks up water and swells, old bitumen felt hides soft patches, and joists sag where a previous covering ponded for years. Laying a new membrane over that is money thrown away, because the new surface follows every dip and the water sits exactly where it sat before.

So the honest answer to what is best starts with the boards. On a flat garage, that usually means a proper new deck, checked falls of around 1 in 80 finished so water actually leaves the roof, and firm support at the edges where trims and drips are fixed. On a pitched garage it means sound battens and a breather membrane, not tiles nailed back onto sixty-year-old sarking. Flat roof build-ups are set out in BS 6229, and we work to it because it is the difference between a roof that drains and a roof that holds a puddle.

Whether you need garage roofing or garage roofing in Guildford, we cover the whole area, and the survey always includes lifting a corner to see what the covering is actually sitting on. If the deck is genuinely sound we say so and price a recover rather than a rebuild.

EPDM, GRP, felt and metal each suit a different garage

There is no single covering that wins everywhere. What matters is the shape of the roof, how many awkward details it has, and how much traffic it will see.

• EPDM rubber. A single sheet on most domestic garages, so there are no seams across the field of the roof to fail. Flexible, forgiving of slight movement in the deck, and quick to lay in one visit. Our usual first suggestion on a plain rectangular flat garage.
• GRP fibreglass. Laid wet and cured in place, so it moulds around upstands, pipe penetrations and awkward corners and finishes hard. Good where the roof is walked on, where a balcony or step-out sits over the garage, or where the shape is fiddly. It needs dry, warm-enough weather to go down properly.
• Felt, meaning torch-on or built-up. Still a sound system when it is a proper multi-layer build-up rather than one thin cap sheet. Sensible on larger spans and on roofs with plenty of detail work.
• Metal sheet. Box profile, standing seam zinc or aluminium, or metal tile sheet. Suits long runs, exposed positions and garages where the original roof was a corrugated sheet. It sheds water fast and takes weather well.
• Tiles or slates. If the garage is pitched and attached to the house, matching the main roof is usually the right call, fixed to BS 5534 so the wind cannot lift them.

Whether you need garage roofing or garage roofing in Woking, we cover the whole area, and we will tell you which of these actually fits your garage instead of fitting whatever we happen to like laying. We also do not hard sell coatings. A liquid coating over a tired roof buys time at best, and we would rather say that plainly than take the money.

Asbestos cement sheets and insulation change the job

Two things turn a straightforward garage recover into a job that needs thinking about before anyone climbs a ladder.

The first is asbestos cement. Plenty of garages built from the 1950s to the early 1980s have corrugated cement sheet roofs, and a fair number of those contain asbestos. Those sheets are not something to break up, drill or sweep. We assess them, tell you what we believe you are dealing with and advise the safe, compliant route under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012. We do not carry out licensed asbestos removal ourselves, and we will not pretend otherwise or quietly bin the sheets with the rest of the strip-out.

The second is insulation and condensation. If the garage is a cold store for a car and a lawnmower, a cold roof with ventilation to BS 5250 is fine. If it has been converted, or is going to be, then a warm roof build-up with the insulation above the deck is the sensible answer, because it keeps the deck warm and stops moisture condensing on the underside. That also raises the question of building control. Under Approved Document L, once you replace more than half of the roof area you are expected to bring the insulation up to standard, and there are cases where a replacement roof needs approval rather than just a competent pair of hands, as GOV.UK's guidance on building regulations approval sets out. We deal with that as part of the re-roof, at quotation stage, not as a surprise halfway through.

Rainwater goes in the same conversation. A garage roof that drains into an undersized gutter or a downpipe that was fine forty years ago will overflow down the wall. We size to BS EN 12056 and fit the outlets to match, and our garage roofing services include the guttering and trims rather than treating them as somebody else's problem.

What a replacement should include before you agree to it

The covering is one line on a quote. What separates a garage roof that lasts twenty-five years from one that leaks in three is the detailing around the edges, and that is where a written fixed price earns its keep.

• Strip and dispose of the old covering, with the deck exposed and checked, not covered over.
• New deck or repairs where boards are soft, with falls corrected so water reaches the outlet.
• Correct upstands where the garage meets the house wall, with lead flashing to Lead Sheet Association guidance rather than mastic smeared into a joint.
• Proper edge trims, drips and a kerb where needed, mechanically fixed.
• Ventilation or a warm build-up chosen deliberately, not left to chance.
• Gutters and downpipes checked and sized, and the site swept clean at the end.

Anything left vague on a quote tends to be the thing that fails. Scott has spent more than 36 years on Surrey roofs and will walk the roof with you, use a drone view where it helps to see what cannot be seen from a ladder, and put a fixed price in writing with no obligation. If a repair will genuinely do, that is what you will be told. Every job carries a 25-year written workmanship guarantee, handed over before the team leaves, and if something is not right within those 25 years we come back and put it right.