Roof Repairs Inner South

Roofing in Inner South: What You Need to Know

The Inner South covers Canberra's oldest residential fabric - Narrabundah, Red Hill, Griffith, Forrest, Yarralumla, Deakin and Kingston - much of it built between the 1920s and the 1950s. That makes it the district where we most often see original terracotta tile still in service, alongside early Canberra Government housing with steeply pitched roofs and generous eaves. Roofs of this age rarely fail all at once. They fail at the details: bedding mortar that has carbonised and lost its grip, valley irons rusted through where decades of leaf litter held moisture against the metal, and lead flashings around chimneys that have worked loose with a century of thermal movement. The mature elms, oaks and eucalypts that make these streets what they are also fill gutters every autumn, and a blocked box gutter on a heritage-era roof backs up under the tiles rather than spilling over the front.