How to get an idea of a property’s age by looking at the roof structure
By Tony Pearson
Firstly, it has to be said that this will usually only give you an approximate age of the property. It’s not as if at midnight on New Year’s Eve, all builders changed the way they were working, and all houses were finished being built! Of course, things evolve over time with some builders changing quickly, to new ways, and others taking longer to change.
Having said that, sometimes you can get lucky as the builder may have written the year they were building the property into the cement on the chimney breast in the loft. As you can see in this photo, this property was probably being built in 1949 and there was a Mr Brown on site!
The first thing to do is carefully have a look in your loft. Ensure you walk on the timbers and not the ceiling below. If the roof structure comprises rafters, purlins and props then the property was built before the mid 1960’s.
In the mid 1960’s builders started to change the design of the structure. They were still using individual timbers and making the structure on site but the design was more like this with junctions formed with bolts.
By the mid 1970’s builders started using preformed trusses that were usually made in a factory and then transported to site. A clear sign of this, is these metal plates at joins. This form of structure is still used today but since the mid 1970’s there have been some changes.
The first came about in the mid 1980’s as builders started having to provide lateral bracing to the trusses. This is a diagonal timber being fitted to stop the trusses falling sideways, basically in the same way dominoes might! Before then, they had no such bracing and relied on the tile battens for this restraint.
By the mid 1990’s it was decided that there should be metal straps from the end timbers to the masonry walls at the sides of the house.
So the next time you’re in your loft, taking up or bringing down the Christmas decorations, have a look around and see what your roof structure looks like. This may give you an idea on when your property was built.
