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Journal · Retrofit · 5 min read

Sixteen owners, one roof: how common repair actually gets agreed

Tenement repair fails on the paperwork, not the building. Organising the drawings by cost centre instead of by trade took consent at Dennistoun Close from nine months to eleven weeks.

Brick roofline seen from below with white dormer windows and a new timber fascia against a blue sky.

The roof at Dennistoun Close had been failing for six years. Nobody disputed that. Two surveys agreed on the scope and roughly on the cost. The building was not the hard part.

Sixteen owners were the hard part, and one of them lived in Perth and had not answered a letter since 2021.

Why the standard drawing set does not help

A normal construction set is organised by trade: roofing, stonework, joinery, electrical. That is the right structure for a contractor pricing the job, and the wrong structure entirely for an owner deciding whether to sign.

An owner is not asking what the roofer does. They are asking what their £4,180 buys, why the neighbour on the ground floor is paying the same when the roof is four storeys above them, and what happens if they say no.

What we did instead

We reissued the same information organised by cost centre (common roof, common stair, individual cills) and gave every owner a copy of the section with their own flat outlined on it. Same survey, same scope, same contractor, different arrangement of the paper.

This is not a trick for getting people to agree to something they should not. Two owners read the reissued set and correctly pushed back on the stair lighting scope, which came out. A clearer drawing loses you some arguments, and those are the arguments you were going to lose anyway, cheaper and earlier.

The rooflight

The one new thing in the job is a rooflight over the stairwell. A tenement stair is the single place in the building where one opening reaches every landing, and the close had never had daylight in it. It cost £3,900 across sixteen shares, £244 each, and it is the thing every owner mentions first when we go back.

If you are one of sixteen owners with a roof that leaks, send us the address. The first visit is £450 and the note that follows is written for owners, not contractors.

More from the studio

  1. Keep it or knock it down? How we cost a retrofit At Gallowgate Works the client arrived with a demolition price. Keeping the warehouse came out £310,000 cheaper. Here is how we built the comparison.
  2. What an architect's fee pays for, stage by stage Eleven per cent of the build cost sounds like a lot until you see where it goes. A plain breakdown of our fee on a £150,000 extension, stage by stage.
  3. What a section is for, and why we draw it first A plan tells you where the walls are. A section tells you whether the building works. Most arguments on a job are section arguments wearing a plan's clothes.

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