How it works
Sixty seconds on the form, no account, no call centre.
We pass it straight to one of the experienced, insured local roofers who works your suburb.
Free quote, no obligation. You deal with them directly from there.
Gutters are where the two Hills problems meet
Up here one job answers two worries at once. A gutter packed with jarrah bark, marri nuts and dry leaf is a place embers can land and sit, and it is also the thing that dams water until it backs up under the tiles in a winter storm. Clearing and replacing guttering is the most requested job on this site for exactly that reason, and it is usually quoted alongside the valleys, the ridge lines and anything the canopy has cracked.
To be plain about it: no gutter clean, gutter guard or ember mesh makes a house bushfire safe, and nothing on this site should be read as saying it does. A roof restoration also does not normally bring a bushfire construction assessment with it. WA's building rules carve out repair work to a building that was not required to meet a bushfire standard when it was built, where the work is either under $20,000 or does not increase the ignition risk. Anyone telling you a roof restoration automatically triggers a bushfire rating is selling you something. Your local government is the permit authority and DFES is the state source, so check it with them rather than with a salesperson. If you want to know what your property sits inside, the Map of Bush Fire Prone Areas is a state map prepared by the Office of Bushfire Risk Management and updated every year, covering bushfire prone vegetation plus a buffer around it, and DFES is the place to start.
Where we cover
Four different local governments, which is a real feature of this part of Perth rather than a technicality. The Shire of Mundaring and the City of Kalamunda are the heart of it, plus the scarp-side parts of the City of Swan and the scarp-side parts of the City of Armadale.
That runs from the Kalamunda town centre and Gooseberry Hill through Lesmurdie, Walliston and the orchard country at Carmel, Bickley and Pickering Brook, across the Foothills at Boya, Greenmount, Swan View and Helena Valley, up the Great Eastern Highway villages from Darlington and Glen Forrest to Mundaring, Sawyers Valley, Mount Helena, Chidlow and Wooroloo, out to Gidgegannup and Brigadoon, and down to the Armadale scarp at Roleystone, Karragullen and Bedfordale. Pick your suburb on the form and the job goes to a roofer who works that end of the Hills.
Why Hills roofs age the way they do
The housing stock is the first reason. The City of Kalamunda's own planning strategy, a 2013 document, records that the majority of housing across the district was built in the 1960s, which reads forward to roughly sixty years old now, and that separate houses make up 93.7% of the stock against 74.8% nationally. Detached houses with their own roofs are almost the whole market here, and sixty-year-old bedding and pointing mortar is what most of those roofs need attention to first. The hills villages carry older stock again, with Darlington and Glen Forrest settled in the 1880s and 1890s and Kalamunda from the 1890s.
The second reason is the canopy. These are tree suburbs by council policy as much as by nature, in jarrah and marri forest, and that means bark and hard nuts in the valleys all year rather than just one leaf drop in autumn. Debris holds damp against the tiles, so moss and lichen take the shaded pitch first, grit wears through old coatings, and falling limbs crack tiles outright.
A note on what is on the roof: concrete and terracotta tile on the older stock, metal on sheds and on newer Foothills builds. There is no reliable published figure for the mix across the Hills, so you will not find a percentage on this site.
How this service works
We are a local referral service, not a roofing company. You tell us what the roof needs, and we pass the job to one of the experienced, insured local roofers we work with, who quotes it free and deals with you directly from there.
WA has no roofing-specific licence class, and that is not the same thing as roof work being unregulated. What matters is how your job is classified, and Building and Energy's own guidance on builder work notes that builder work can include re-roofing.
The regulator is Building and Energy. Builder work is building work that needs a building permit and is valued at $20,000 or more, or $50,000 or more for a Class 10a building, meaning a shed, carport or private garage, and it must be carried out by a registered building contractor or an approved owner-builder. Work that needs no building permit can be carried out by anyone whatever it costs. So there are two questions to ask rather than one. Ask your local government, which is the permit authority, whether your job needs a building permit. Then ask the contractor what registration they hold and check it with Building and Energy before you sign anything. Insurance and an itemised written quote are worth checking too, but they are not a substitute for that. Plumbing in WA is licensed by the Plumbers Licensing Board, and the regime turns on what counts as plumbing work rather than on a dollar value, so there is no job-size threshold below which it stops applying. Whether roof drainage, gutters and downpipes fall inside licensed plumbing work is not something this page will assert either way. Ask the contractor what licence or registration your job needs, and confirm it with Building and Energy and with your local government before the work starts. On roof coating we will not give you an answer either way. Whether Building and Energy treats roof coating as painting work under WA's painter registration is not settled, so saying a registration is required and saying one is not would both be invented. Ask the contractor in writing what registration they hold for the coating part of your job and check whatever they give you with Building and Energy.