Skylights and rooflights in Blaby

Blaby calls itself a village, and the record backs it up: a large village in central Leicestershire, about five miles south of the city centre, and part of the Leicester urban area because it sits so close. From Leicester you reach Blaby after 5.7 road miles, a quarter of an hour on the road, bearing south-south-west. That is short enough that a survey here rarely takes a whole morning out of anyone's day.

The oldest part of the village has a character you can pick out by roof alone. The Bakers Arms, a thatched pub, is recorded as dating back to 1485, and the Fox & Tiger, the Bulls Head and the Black Horse stand as the other public houses. A skylight is not going into a thatched roof, and nobody would ask for one. What the thatch tells us is that the surrounding lanes have a long memory, and that anything we propose near them gets looked at with the street in mind.

The village record also notes that old Blaby is a conservation area, though it says there are few buildings of outstanding historical or architectural interest. The planning data fills in the detail: the Blaby conservation area dates from the autumn of 1976 and has nine listed buildings recorded within its boundary, which splits into one Grade I and eight at the lower Grade II. A second designation, along the Grand Union Canal, was made in 2000 and sits just under a kilometre from the village centre.

Anyone living in old Blaby might expect that every rooflight is a battle. It is not that simple. Where a house is simply inside a conservation area, the ordinary Class C allowance for a rooflight or roof window on a home generally still stands, unless the council has made a special Article 4 direction to take it away. If the house is on the statutory list, consent for the work has to be won first, and that is the point at which we stop and send you the right form rather than carry on measuring.

Should a rooflight need an application, this is what the council will be looking at when it reads the application. Blaby District Council is the planning authority here, and an application shows the roof in context. They want to know the size of the opening, where it sits in the slope and how far it stands proud of the slates or tiles. Bring a few photographs of the roof from the lane, and one from the garden, and the conversation becomes much shorter. We can sketch the position on those photographs at the survey so you have something to show a neighbour or the council.

For a roof facing the lane, the usual answer is smaller and lower than the owner first imagined. For the back slope, which nobody sees from the street, the options widen. Our approach is to survey both, tell you plainly what each would look like, and let you choose before the quote is written. If you want to see how the paperwork fits together, the planning and building regulations guide sets it out in one place.

The planning data has little to say about when each of Blaby's streets was built, and we will not invent a date or an estate name to fill a gap. What we can say is how houses of this kind are surveyed. Many family homes have a pitched roof, a loft boarded for storage, and a landing or hallway below with no window of its own. Each of those is a rooflight job waiting to be asked for.

We begin in the loft with a torch and a tape. The rafters tell us where a roof window can sit without cutting more timber than it should, and the floor-to-ridge height tells us whether the room can actually be used as a room. Many lofts turn out to be fine for a single window that lights a landing stair and nothing more. That is a perfectly good result, and it is cheaper in time and disruption than a full conversion.

Round the back, a flat-roofed extension is where the next request tends to land. Flat-roofed kitchens and dining rooms have plenty of light at the garden end and a dim middle. The fix is a flat roof rooflight standing on a kerb built up high enough that rain runs off cleanly rather than lying against the frame. We measure the fall of the roof before anything is ordered, because a flat roof is never perfectly flat and the kerb has to allow for that.

Not every job here is a new opening. Houses of this type sometimes carry an older rooflight from an earlier extension, a plastic dome that has clouded or a frame that has dropped. Where the upstand around it is sound, the glazing can often be swapped without disturbing the roof structure, which keeps the work short and leaves the plaster alone. Where the upstand has softened, we say so and show you before we propose anything bigger.

Some owners want the extension light to be something more than a window. A roof lantern, with its raised glass crown, gives height to the room as well as brightness. It also needs a bigger opening and a stronger upstand, so we decide that at the survey rather than guess from a photo.

The survey ends with a fixed written quote, so the price you agree is the price you pay. Where the job is notifiable, Building Control hears about it from us, and ten years of workmanship guarantee stand behind the fitting. You can send photographs on WhatsApp first and we will tell you if there is anything we would want to look at closely.

The A426 and the B582 both run within a kilometre of Blaby, and, the record places Fosse Park and both motorways, M1 and M69, a few miles away. In practice that means our van approaches from the city side and is rarely held up by anything other than the usual traffic. There is no railway station any more: the one on the Birmingham to Peterborough line closed in 1968, so the road network is the thing that holds the village together.

Water is close. The River Sence and the Grand Union Canal (the Leicester Line) both sit close by, within about 1.5 km, and Narborough Bog and Crow Mills are named nature reserves within a couple of kilometres. Roofs near trees and water collect things: leaves, moss, bird droppings and the dust that settles in damp air. A rooflight in those spots wants a slope steep enough, or a self-cleaning surface good enough, that rain does most of the washing.

Shade matters too. A house that sits under mature trees may find that a south-facing rooflight is far less bright than it looks on a drawing, while one that gets full sun can overheat a room in summer. The answer there is glass with a solar control coating, which takes the edge off the heat and leaves the room bright. It is worth raising at the survey, since the cost in comfort of the wrong glass is paid for years.

Glen Parva, the suburb about 1.2 km away, is one of the neighbours whose roofs we also see, and its page sits alongside this one for anyone nearby. If your house falls between the two, either page will point you to the right survey. Replacing an old, misted rooflight is a separate job from a new one, and our replacement service deals with it without touching the opening if the kerb is sound.

A rooflight that looks well from the road is the best advertisement it can have, and we would rather it earned that on the quality of the fit than on anything we say about it.

To arrange a free survey, use the quote form. We come to Blaby, climb into the loft, measure the flat roof, and put the result in writing.