Larger Khandallah homes, heavy tree cover, and hard-to-reach roofs.

Big homes, big roofs, and a lot of trees.

We take on roof work right across Khandallah, from the flatter streets around the village shops, up over the ridgeline homes, and along the bush-fringe sections that run towards Broadmeadows and Johnsonville. On site we go over every roof area we can safely reach and see, then write the lot up in an assessment letter. When a slope is too steep, sits under thick canopy, or is too high to reach safely from the ground, the drone goes up to capture the close detail instead.

Khandallah's housing stock is older, larger and more architect-designed than most Wellington suburbs. Solid 1920s-50s bungalows on substantial sections, mid-century modernist homes with complex roof geometry, and modern builds with mixed roofing systems. The unifying factor is the trees. Khandallah is one of Wellington's most wooded suburbs and most roofs we inspect have trees overhanging some part of them.

We've been over just about every roof Wellington throws up: clay and concrete tile, long-run steel, decramastic, skillion membrane, and the older systems underneath them. In Khandallah that breadth really counts, because the architect-designed homes here often carry two or three roofing systems at once, with awkward junctions where one meets the next. Working out exactly what you're looking at, and the way each of those roofs tends to give out, is what separates a real assessment from a quick look over the fence.

What we typically find on Khandallah roofs

• Heavy moss and lichen coverage on shaded north-of-tree-cover slopes, often the dominant finding on Khandallah tile roofs.
• Leaf and debris loading in gutters and valleys, especially under deciduous tree cover.
• Aged ridge cap pointing on older tile roofs, often still original.
• Wear on decramastic roofs from the 70s-90s era homes, particularly stone-chip loss.
• Complex flashing details on architect-designed homes (multiple pitches, skillion sections, parapets) where workmanship and condition vary significantly between details.
• Branch contact damage on roof surfaces, ridges, and flashings, particularly after big southerlies.
• Membrane condition on the flat-roof skillions common to mid-century modernist Khandallah homes.

Trees, geometry, height.

Khandallah is one of the Wellington suburbs where ground-level and ladder inspection doesn't work. The combination of steep section gradients, mature tree cover, two-storey downhill exposure on hill homes, and complex multi-plane roof geometry on architect-designed homes means most of the roof isn't visible without elevated access.

A drone gives us safe close-up access to the steep, high and tree-shaded sections that are hard to reach from the ground. We photograph ridges, valleys, flashings, parapet details and skillion sections from the air, and we can plan flight paths around the branches that would otherwise block a ladder or scaffold.

For more on this, see our guide on why building inspectors can't access steep Wellington roofs.