Super six roofs, eaves and gables in Traralgon

Reading your roof from the footpath

Super six is the easy one. The corrugations are broad and deep, far wider than a modern steel roof, and the sheet is grey cement, often dark with lichen on the south side. The ridge is covered by separate moulded capping pieces. It was used on garages, sheds and some houses.

Eaves take a closer look. Stand under the overhang and look up: flat sheets, usually painted, with thin joining strips between them, are the classic cement sheet eave. Going by the era rather than a count, they're common on brick veneers of the 1970s and 80s, the Loy Yang construction years that grew Traralgon by more than five thousand people. Nobody has counted Traralgon's eaves.

Gables are the triangles at the ends of a pitched roof. On many older houses they're filled with flat cement sheet rather than brick or weatherboard. Same material, same rules as the eaves.

If the house was built before 1990, assume any of these may contain asbestos until a lab says otherwise. A sample test costs far less than a mistake. See testing and inspection.

What not to do up there

Latrobe City's homeowner fact sheet has one firm rule for roofs: never high-pressure clean an asbestos cement roof. Blasting off the lichen blasts fibres into the gutters, the yard and next door's yard.

Walking on it is the other trap. Old cement sheet goes brittle and can crack under your weight. Drilling for a solar bracket, an antenna or a skylight is disturbing the sheet, so ask a removalist before any of that. If you're thinking of painting or sealing the roof instead of replacing it, get advice from a licensed removalist or an occupational hygienist on whether it suits your sheets.

Eaves on their own

Eaves often come up when something else is happening: new gutters and fascias, a re-roof in steel, an extension that ties into the old roof line. The area can be modest. Say the eave is 600 millimetres deep along 30 metres of house: that's 18 square metres, over the 10 square metre line, which brings the longer WorkSafe notice and a clearance certificate from an independent inspector at the end.

A single short run of eave, like a carport or a porch, might come in at 10 square metres or less. Then no clearance certificate is legally required. Whoever you engage measures it and tells you which applies. Eave sheets are overhead work, so ask whether a scaffold or platform is in the price.

Stripping a roof, start to finish

• Whoever you engage measures up and asks what's going back on, because the two trades have to be scheduled together.
• The work area is fenced off with signs. Sheets are kept damp with a fine mist, screws backed out, old nails cut or levered, and each sheet lowered by hand rather than slid or dropped.
• Everything is wrapped on site in two layers of heavy plastic, taped and labelled.
• On a house, ask whether the roof space is in the scope. Dust from the old sheet can settle on top of the ceiling, and the quote should say whether cleaning it is included.
• Any house or garage roof is well over 10 square metres, so the five-day WorkSafe notice and an independent clearance both apply. The services page sets out that paperwork in order.

When a storm has had a go at it

Old cement roofing doesn't flex. A falling branch or a big wind can crack sheets or lift them off the battens, and the pieces end up in the gutters and the yard. After the storm of 13 February 2024, when Traralgon was among the towns hit, the state's community newsletter warned that storm debris can include asbestos fragments and should be avoided.

So if your roof or eaves have been damaged, keep people and pets away from the broken bits, and don't hose or sweep them up. That's urgent: if the material is broken, burnt or blown down and you need someone today, don't register here: ring a licensed removalist directly from WorkSafe Victoria's directory. Whether the job qualifies for the regulations' unexpected-situation notice is for the removalist to decide once one takes it on. The storm, flood and fire damage page goes further.

Booking the roofer behind them

Removal and re-roofing are separate jobs with separate quotes. The removalist leaves you with bare battens; the roofer puts the new roof on. Book the roofer before the old roof comes off, and ask both what happens if rain is forecast in between. Ask whoever quotes whether they can work alongside a roofer or whether you line one up yourself. Either way, never strip a house roof without the replacement locked in.

The removal quote and the roofing quote price different things. Square metres come first on the removal side, then roof pitch and height, any scaffold or access equipment, any sheet that crumbles under hand pressure (friable, so Class A work), the roof space clean, eaves and gables added to the job, and the clearance. The cost guide has the published ranges. The new roof is the roofer's price.

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