Roofing across Campbelltown, Camden and Macarthur

A brown ring spreading across a bedroom ceiling after a southerly change. A cracked ridge cap lying on the driveway. That is how most roof jobs around here start, and both of those are symptoms of the same thing: a Macarthur roof that has quietly run out of road.

We arrange roof repairs, restorations and full re-roofs across the whole district — the 1970s and 80s tile estates on the valley floor at Leumeah, Minto and Claymore, the older streets behind Queen Street in Campbelltown, the Nepean River flats at Camden and Elderslie, and the new Colorbond estates out along The Northern Road at Oran Park and Gregory Hills. Call (02) 4601 5100 for a free inspection and a written quote. No obligation attached to either.

Three ages of roof, three sets of faults

Macarthur is unusual. Most Sydney districts have housing stock spread across a century. Ours arrived in three distinct waves, so the roofs fail in three distinct ways — and they fail on a schedule.

The brick-and-tile belt, 1970s to 1990s

Campbelltown's growth decades put an enormous number of concrete-tile roofs on the ground in a short window. The State Government housing programs at Airds, Claymore, Minto and Macquarie Fields, and the private estates that followed at Eagle Vale, Eschol Park, Raby, Kearns, Ambarvale and Rosemeadow, were built close together in time. They are now ageing close together in time too.

The tiles themselves often have years left. What does not is everything holding them in place:

• Ridge and hip pointing. Rigid cement mortar, cooked through forty-odd inland summers, crazes and drops out in crumbs.
• Bedding mortar under the caps goes soft, and caps start to rock.
• Galvanised valley irons rust through from the bottom of the valley upward, usually under a dam of leaf litter.
• No sarking. A lot of roofs from this era were laid straight onto battens, so wind-driven rain that gets past a tile has nothing between it and your ceiling.

Camden, Elderslie and the heritage pocket

West of the hills the picture changes completely. Around Argyle Street, out to Elderslie and the old Camden rail alignment, you get terracotta tile, early corrugated steel, verandah skillions, parapets and box gutters — roof forms that need the right profile rather than the cheapest sheet.

The Camden town centre sits inside a heritage conservation area, and work on a listed building or inside the conservation area is assessed on whether the roof form and material suit the building. The equivalent in Campbelltown is the Queen Street Heritage Conservation Area. Plain like-for-like re-roofing is usually exempt development; heritage streets are where that stops being true, and that is worth knowing before anyone orders sheets.

The new Colorbond estates

Oran Park, Gregory Hills, Harrington Park, Mount Annan and Currans Hill are a different trade again. Low pitches, narrow lots, big alfresco additions, parapet walls with concealed gutters, and solar arrays on nearly everything.

On a ten to twenty year old metal roof out there, the sheet is rarely the problem. The problems are the EPDM washers under the screws going chalky and hard after sustained UV, flashings at the parapet, downpipes that were sized for the original footprint and not the extension, and penetrations that have been walked over by three different trades.

Hail and heat do most of the damage out here

Two things define roofing west of the Georges River. The first is heat: Macarthur sits a long way back from the coast and gets the full inland summer, which is what destroys rigid ridge mortar and ages exposed rubber and sealant faster than the brochure says.

The second is hail. Western Sydney sits in a storm corridor, and the damage pattern is predictable. Tiles crack, chip and lose their surface coating. Metal dents across the pans and can split at the ribs if the stones are big enough. Whirlybirds shred, skylight domes craze, gutters pock and stop draining properly.

Half of post-storm roofing is paperwork, not tin. We photograph and measure what we find and give you a written report your insurer can actually use. See storm and emergency roof repairs for how a make-safe works.

How a job runs here

1. Free inspection. Someone gets up on the roof and into the ceiling space where access allows, and tells you what is actually wrong.
2. Written quote, itemised, so you can see what is repair and what is replacement. Nothing to sign on the day.
3. The work. Carried out by established, licensed and insured roofing contractors working to NSW Fair Trading requirements. Residential work over $5,000 gets a written contract; over $20,000 the insurance certificate is attached to it.
4. Workmanship warranty, in writing, on completed work.

What actually moves the price

We will not quote a roof over the phone, and nobody honest will. What the inspection is measuring is: total roof area, pitch, how many hips and valleys there are, single or double storey, truck and ladder access on the block, the material you want, and how far water has already travelled into battens and timber.

Two local factors come up often. Blocks that climb toward the Scenic Hills can need extra edge protection. And on pre-1990 homes, outbuildings and eaves sheeting can be asbestos cement — more than ten square metres of bonded material has to be removed by a licensed asbestos removalist who notifies SafeWork NSW five days beforehand. That is a cost line, and we flag it before you are surprised by it.

Where we work

Twenty-eight suburbs across the Campbelltown and Camden council areas, from Glenfield in the north to Menangle Park in the south and Oran Park in the west. The full list, with what we see in each area, is on the service areas page.

Start with a roof inspection and report if you are not sure what you are dealing with, or call (02) 4601 5100 and describe what you have noticed. If it turns out to be a half-hour repair, we will say so.