Roof assessments for Newtown's densest villa and terraced stock.

Old stock, small sections, and roofs that run into each other.

We take on roof work all over Newtown, from the shops and hospital on Riddiford Street to the packed residential streets running back toward Mt Cook and the Town Belt edge. We look the roof over and put what we find in a written assessment letter. When a pitch is steep, high, worn, or wedged up against a neighbour and can't be reached safely from ground level, we bring in the drone and photograph it in close-up from the air.

Newtown's housing stock is mostly older and densely packed. Victorian villas, Edwardian cottages, terraced rows, and the occasional original semi-detached. There are also more recent townhouses and infill builds. What ties it together is density: sections are small, neighbouring buildings are close, and the roofs interact with each other in ways the inner-suburb sections don't.

We have assessed the whole spread of Wellington roofs, from villa-era tile and old corrugate through to long-run metal and membrane. In Newtown that history counts: original villa and cottage roofs here sit under decades of piecemeal repairs from every era, and pinning down what is actually up there now, and what got patched over what, is usually the point where a general building inspection runs out of road.

What we typically find on Newtown roofs

• Aged ridge cap pointing on older tile roofs, often never redone since the home was built.
• Lead and zinc flashing fatigue around the original chimneys typical of Newtown villas. A lot of it is well past its useful life.
• Party-wall flashing wear on terraced and semi-detached homes, where the flashing between attached properties is one of the most common leak sources.
• Mixed-era patch repairs from decades of small fixes. Newtown's rental and investor stock typically has more repair history than a single-owner inner suburb.
• Long-run metal re-roof condition on the many Newtown homes that were re-roofed away from original tile at some point.
• Gutter and downpipe issues, more common where tree cover or moss is heavy and where the downpipes discharge close to neighbouring buildings.
• Roof penetration details on infill and townhouse builds, especially around solar mounts, plumbing vents, and flue penetrations.

Tight sections, shared walls, overhead lines.

Newtown is one of the suburbs where ladder and scaffold access is awkward. Sections are small, neighbouring buildings are close, and overhead power lines run down most streets. Reaching a terraced roof up close is hard from the street, so the drone photographs the ridgelines, valleys and party-wall junctions from the air.

A drone gives us safe close-up access to those steep, high and shared roof areas from the air, without a ladder or scaffold. We photograph the details that are hard to reach from the ground: party-wall flashings between attached homes, the back-of-house pitches that face a neighbour's section, and the valleys between dormers and main roofs.

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