Maintenance & Hiring

In May 2025 a retired farmer in Kaiapoi laid three quotes on his kitchen table and asked me which one was lying. His 1978 house had a long-run roof with rust through at the laps on the south side and a low-pitch lean-to over the laundry that had leaked since the February hail. The quotes

The leak in Island Bay had beaten two roofers before it got to me in August 2022. A 1950s weatherboard house on the hill above The Parade, long-run steel from a 1998 reroof, a wet patch on the lounge ceiling only in southerlies. Both roofers had sealed the ridge for good measure. I went up

A couple in Wigram rang me in October 2024 because one painter had told them their 2008 roof needed a full repaint, and a second had said it needed nothing but a wash. Same roof, one week apart, quotes of NZ$7,800 and NZ$650. The Colorsteel was sound, the chalk test on the north face came

In 2015 a mate in St Albans asked me to help clear the spouting on his 1955 concrete tile roof on Rutland Street. I had been walking my own tile roof in Hoon Hay for a decade and thought I knew how. I put a foot on the middle of a tile, heard a crack

Last autumn I looked at a 1968 Monier-type concrete tile roof in Spreydon that the owner had treated with a spray-on moss killer twelve months earlier. The product had done its job — the moss was dead and brown. The problem was that nobody had swept or washed it off. The tile surface under the