Camberwell Potteries Roofing in Camberwell

I needed the roof on my 100 year old terrace converted from slate to tile. The roof has been a problem for a while, slates sliding down, and in my mid sixties with a bad hip, hopping up ladders in rain storms is very difficult.

The south side of the house is the boundary of my property, so there is a parapet wall and a box gutter to take the rain water to the west end of the tiled section whence it drains off into a rain head. The leaves from my neighbour’s trees gather in the gutter, and this causes intermittent problems in autumn or when there has been a dry spell. The gutter was relined 2 years ago and has worked well.

I had trouble finding someone to retile my roof, but Camberwell Potteries (CP) seemed to be competent. They had been in business a long time, and Glenn, who came to do the quote, seemed a straight forward fellow. I was job 2015-1283.

When the tiling was done, a plumber who was independently working on the house said that I would have to call CP back. The tiles on the south side had been installed so that they completely covered the box gutter. How could they have done this? It was always going to cause problems.

At this stage I had not paid the balance of the money for the job, so they came the next day. They sent the tiler who had done the original job, and he said that he had thought it looked neater with the tiles covering the gutter.

The next day I received a photo showing the gutter with the tiles trimmed back, and I paid the balance of the money.

That was February this year. The next serious rain was mid April, and I came out at 7 am that morning to the sound of rain on the roof and water cascading into my lounge room. There was nothing to do but for me to hop in the roof, and I found that whereas the tiles along the gutter had been trimmed, the ridge on the roof that runs down to the corner where the rain head had only been trimmed half as far, and so was protruding into the gutter. The ridge had snagged the leaves that in the past would have been flushed out into the rainhead. These leaves had dammed the water behind them, and this water had come into my house, damaging the plaster on the ceiling.

I sent CP an email about the problem and later had a very robust discussion with Glenn, now not nearly as genial, about the problem.

The next day CP sent the same tiler to fix things. He explained that it was his job to trim the tiles, but someone else should have come to trim back the ridge. They also sent Bryce, their supervisor, who later emailed me that the fault had in fact been caused by the way the box gutter had been installed, and that this is what had caused the water to come into my house. This was despite the fact that the gutter had been in place for 2 years without a problem and that I had seen the leaves across the gutter and the rainwater dammed up behind it.

The nett result is that the job is still not right, and CP are now ignoring me. I am going to have to get someone else to fix things and then I will have to take CP to VCAT to be recompensed. Who needs this sort of stuff?

CP have accused me of being ‘inaccurate and unfair’ in my criticisms, so if you, the reader, want to see if I am telling the truth, email me at geoff105 [at] gmail.com with the heading ‘roof problems’ and I will send you back photos of the tiles covering the gutter, the photo they sent me after fix 1 allegedly showing that all was OK, a photo of actual situation with the ridge protruding down into the gutter, and the problems that still remain after CPs 2 fixes.

If you ignore all this and use them anyway, you might like to get an independent party to come and look at their handiwork before you pay the rest of the balance due. It would be money very well spent.