Skylights & Rooflights in WetherbyRooflights for a stone-built market town beside the Wharfe

Wetherby is a market town on the River Wharfe, and its houses show several different building periods side by side.

Near the middle you find Georgian and Victorian stone buildings, some terraced and some standing alone. Beyond them come inter-war semis, then bungalows and chalet bungalows, and finally the large modern estates that spread the town outwards. Roofs range from stone and slate on the oldest buildings to concrete and clay tiles on the newer ones.

That variety is the main reason we survey each house before suggesting anything. A product that suits a 1930s house may look wrong on a stone terrace, and the other way round. The town is also bypassed by the A1(M), which keeps the journey from York a simple one.

Wetherby lies in West Yorkshire, so its planning authority is Leeds City Council, not North Yorkshire.

People who live just outside York sometimes assume all of the surrounding towns answer to the same office. Here, they do not. Leeds City Council decides planning applications, deals with listed building consent and publishes the conservation area details for Wetherby. Houses normally keep their permitted development rights for a rooflight, within the limits laid out in the planning guide, while a flat or maisonette needs an application.

The historic centre of the town is a conservation area, one of the places where the look of a street matters to the council as well as to neighbours. Permitted development still applies to houses there, but an Article 4 direction can remove it on particular streets, so ask the council about your address before you commit.

If you are unsure whether your street is affected, the council can tell you, and it is a short question to put to them. We can help you word it, and we will tell you plainly at the survey which slope we would choose for the glass and why. Choosing the back of the roof avoids most of the difficulty, and in a good many Wetherby houses the rear slope is also the one that gets the better light.

In Wetherby the first phone call is to Leeds, which surprises people who expect North Yorkshire.

From a survey in Wetherby

An older Wetherby roof often has more weight, more character and more fragility than a modern tiled one.

Stone slates are thick and heavy and are laid in diminishing courses, with the biggest at the eaves. When one has to be moved to let in a flashing, it can break along a hidden fault, so we handle each by hand and keep a record of the order they came off. Welsh slate is thinner and lighter but can be brittle with age. Either way, the covering is taken back neatly round the opening and refitted so the new window looks as if it belongs.

The roof structure under older coverings is worth a look as well, since the age of a roof says little about the state of the timbers inside it. Old rafters may be small by modern standards, and trimming round an opening may need extra support. We check it at the survey and describe what we find in the written quote.

The semis and villas of Wetherby often have roofs that could hold a bedroom or study with the right light.

An inter-war semi usually has a hipped roof with a decent amount of space beneath it, enough for a loft room if the stairs can be fitted. Two windows placed in a row on the back of the roof share daylight evenly across the room. A Victorian villa may have a taller roof and an easier time of it.

Before any loft becomes a bedroom, the question of escape matters. A roof window does not satisfy fire escape rules for a loft over two storeys, which needs a protected stair. We cover this on our roof window installation page, and we raise it early so it does not become a surprise.

Whichever route suits the house, the order of events is the same. We survey, you decide, the quote is itemised, and we agree dates that fit round school runs, work-from-home days and anything else going on in the house. Because the roof is closed every evening, the dates are not at the mercy of one wet afternoon, though a very wet or windy morning may still move the roof-opening part of the job by a day.

Not every dark room is under a slope you can glaze. A hall or landing with no outside wall can be lit by a sun tunnel, which needs only a small opening in the roof and a reflective tube through the space beneath it. Many Wetherby semis have just such a landing at the top of the stairs.

A roof lantern is a popular finishing touch on a rear extension, and Wetherby has plenty of those.

A deep kitchen-diner can be dark in the middle. Glass in the roof takes care of that. Where the room is new and the lantern is part of the same application, the council assesses them together. On an existing roof, a lantern usually rises more than 150mm and may need an application or a confirmation from Leeds City Council.

The hidden work matters here. The lantern sits on an insulated upstand, and the membrane, the insulation and the flashings under it decide whether the room stays warm and dry. We photograph that work before it is covered, and the pictures are yours at handover. The roof lantern installation service page has the detail.

Extensions from earlier decades often carry a dome or an early glazed rooflight that no longer does its job.

Look up from the room below. A plastic dome that has turned cloudy or cracked at the corners is finished. A glazed unit with a film of mist trapped between the panes has lost its seal. A brown ring on the ceiling beside the frame suggests water has been getting in around the upstand. Each of these points to a different cure, and we find out which at the survey rather than guessing from the ground.

If the sealed glass is the only part that has gone, our misted and failed rooflights service exchanges that glass and keeps the frame. A complete replacement is a controlled fitting and so notifiable, and we deal with that notification for you.

Wetherby houses are lived in, and the work is planned round the people in them.

Before anything else happens, dust sheets go over the floors and stairs and the furniture is wrapped, with screens up round the working area where the plan of the house permits. The same crew sees the job through. Each evening the roof is left weathertight. Waste leaves with us, and the rooms are cleaned.

Wetherby is about 14.4 road miles west of York, comfortably inside the distance we travel.

The survey is free. We inspect the roof and the room, discuss planning with you, and then send an itemised written quote, one cost per line, with a plan for each day of the fit. The finished job ends with a walk-through, and you keep the product details, every maker's warranty, the 10-year workmanship guarantee and, if the work had to be notified, the Building Control certificate.

We also work in Boston Spa, Collingham and Bramham. Fill in the short form below and we will get back to you.

If you already have a builder or an architect on the project, they are welcome to join the survey. Having the person who drew the extension or sets the ceiling heights in the room means questions about the roof build-up, the upstand height and the finished look get answered once, in front of the actual opening.