Fascias and soffits: what replacing them costs and when to bother

The fascia is the board running along the bottom edge of the roof that the gutter is fixed to. The soffit is the flat panel underneath it, closing the gap between the fascia and the wall. Together with the bargeboards at the gable ends, that lot is what the trade calls the roofline.

It is also the job that gets sold hardest, door to door, to people who do not need it. So this is what it costs and how to tell whether yours actually need doing.

What it costs

Market figures, not my price list.

A typical three bedroom semi, doing fascias, soffits and guttering all the way round, generally lands somewhere between £1,800 and £3,500. A terrace with only a front and back to do can be well under that. A detached house with several gables, or anything three storeys, goes above it.

What moves the number:

• How much of it there is. Priced by the metre. A bungalow with a big footprint can have more roofline than a taller house with a smaller one.
• Whether the guttering is included. It usually is, and it should be, because taking the old gutter off is unavoidable to get at the fascia and putting the old one back on new boards is false economy.
• Gables and dormers. Bargeboards at a gable end are more work per metre than a straight eaves run. Every dormer adds detail.
• Access. Three storeys, a conservatory in the way, or a rear yard you cannot get a tower into, all mean scaffold.
• What is behind it. If the rafter feet have rotted, that is carpentry, and it has to be done before anything is capped or replaced.

Capping over, and why I do not like it

There are two ways to do this job.

Full replacement. The old timber comes off. Whatever is behind it gets looked at. New uPVC fascia and soffit go on, fixed properly to sound timber.

Capping over. A thin uPVC cover board is fixed over the existing timber, and the soffit is boarded under. The old wood stays where it is.

Capping is cheaper and quicker, and there is a narrow case where it is legitimate: the existing timber is genuinely sound, dry and solid, and the problem is purely that it looks tired.

The problem is that this is rarely why people are having the work done. If the timber is rotten, capping seals wet wood inside plastic with no ventilation. It looks perfect for about four years. Then the rafter feet the whole roof edge is fixed to have gone soft, and the repair is considerably more expensive than doing it properly the first time.

The test is simple and you can ask it directly: is the old timber coming off, or is it being covered up? If a quote is materially cheaper than the others, that is usually the answer.

How to tell if yours need doing

Go outside, stand back, and look up. Then get closer with a ladder if you can do so safely, or just look from an upstairs window.

Signs they need replacing:

• Timber that is dark, soft, or flaking, particularly at the ends and at joints
• Paint that has stopped adhering, blistering in sheets rather than flaking gently
• Visible gaps between the fascia and the roof edge
• Sagging along a gutter run, which usually means the fascia behind it has lost its strength
• Birds getting in under the eaves. Where a bird can get in, the soffit has failed
• Green growth on the underside of the soffit, which means it stays wet

Signs they do not:

• Peeling paint on sound wood. That is redecoration, and it is a fraction of the cost
• Discolouration and staining with no softness underneath
• One rotten section. That is a repair, not a full replacement
• Somebody knocked on your door about it. Genuinely: the correlation between doorstep roofline sales and roofline that needs replacing is very weak

The push test settles it. Press firmly on the fascia with a screwdriver handle at a few points along its length, particularly near the ends. Sound timber resists. Rotten timber gives.

Why it matters more than it looks

It is easy to see this as cosmetic, and it is not.

The fascia carries the gutter. When it softens, the gutter loses its line and its fall, water starts sitting in it or running over the back of it, and that water goes down the wall. The wall gets wet, and on the older solid-wall housing across most of inner Leeds a persistently wet wall means damp inside.

Worse, the fascia is fixed to the ends of the rafters. If water gets past it and stays there, the rafter feet rot, and the rafter feet are structural. That repair means opening up the roof edge, cutting out and splicing in new timber, and re-laying the bottom courses of slate or tile. It is a genuinely expensive job and it is entirely preventable by dealing with a fascia when it goes.

Ventilation, which is the part nobody mentions

Modern roofs need air moving through them. Warm damp air from the house rises into the roof space, and if it cannot get out it condenses on the cold underside of the roof, which produces damp, mould and eventually rot in the timbers.

Most of that ventilation happens at the eaves, through the soffit. Which means when the soffit is replaced, the ventilation has to be replaced with it: continuous vent strips, or circular vents at intervals.

A cheap job boards over the soffit with solid uPVC, no vents, and creates a ventilation problem in a roof that did not have one. The householder then gets condensation in the loft the following winter and has no idea it is connected. If you take one thing from this: ask what ventilation is being fitted at the soffit. If the answer is a blank look, get somebody else.

Leeds specifics

The through terraces and back-to-backs in Hyde Park, Woodhouse, Harehills and Burley often have very little roofline at the front, because the gutter sits on the stonework or on a shallow overhang. The work is usually at the back and on the back addition, which is where the timber has had a hundred and twenty years of weather with less sun on it to dry it out.

The interwar semis at Adel, Cookridge, Weetwood, Moortown and Horsforth are the classic roofline job: generous overhanging eaves, painted timber fascias and soffits, gable bargeboards, and original woodwork now approaching a hundred years old. This is where the doorstep sales concentrate, and also where the work is often genuinely needed.

The postwar estates at Seacroft, Middleton, Whinmoor and Belle Isle frequently had uPVC fitted in the eighties or nineties, and first generation uPVC has gone brittle and yellow. That is a replacement rather than a first fit, and it is generally simpler because there is no rot underneath.

The honest summary

If your roofline is soft, get it done, and get it done properly rather than capped. It protects the rafter feet, which is the expensive thing behind it.

If your roofline is just tired, paint it. It will cost a few hundred pounds instead of a few thousand and it will last five to eight years, by which point you will have a clearer idea of whether the wood underneath is going.

And if the job was suggested to you by somebody who came to the door, get somebody independent to press a screwdriver into it before you agree to anything.