Why the sequence is the whole product
People shop for this job by comparing products. Which liquid rubber, what warranty, how many litres. That is the wrong axis. Two crews using the identical drum of the identical product will hand you two completely different roofs, and the difference is entirely in the sequence and the preparation.
So here is the sequence in full, so you can hold any quotation, including ours, up against it.
Stage one: inspection and the honest verdict
Someone gets onto or alongside the roof from a safe access point and photographs it properly. Not a walk around the garden. What we are looking for is sheet condition, whether the face is chalking and how badly, hairline cracking off the fixings, oval bolt holes, open side and end laps, the state of the ridge and valley flashings, moss on the shaded pitches, and whether any sheet has been walked through and patched with something from the hardware.
Inside the roof space matters just as much. Water tracks along purlins before it drops, so the stain on your ceiling is often metres from the entry point. Daylight through the sheeting, damp timber and rust trails on the fixings tell you where to look above.
The verdict at the end of this stage is binary. Either the sheets are sound enough to encapsulate, or they are not and the job belongs to a registered removal contractor. There is no third answer where we coat it anyway and hope.
Stage two: the clean, which is where most jobs are lost
The clean is done by hand. Gentle water, soft tools, moss and lichen lifted and treated rather than blasted. No pressure washer, no wire brush, no grinder, no sanding. This takes longer than blasting and it is the single biggest reason a proper quote is not the cheapest quote.
Then the roof has to dry properly. Fibre cement holds water, and coating a damp sheet is how you get blistering three weeks later. In Cape Town that means watching the weather rather than the calendar.
Stage three: the primer, which is doing more work than the coats
An old asbestos sheet does not have a face any more, it has a chalk layer. Bonding Liquid Super+ soaks into that layer and binds it back into something coherent. Skip it and your beautiful three coat membrane is glued to loose powder, and loose powder is glued to nothing.
This is the step that gets deleted from cheap quotes, because it is invisible the day after it goes on and it costs both material and a day. It is also the step that decides whether you are recoating in twelve years or repainting in eighteen months.
Stage four: the details, before any field coat
Water does not come through the middle of a sheet. It comes through the places where two things meet. So every one of those places is treated individually before the roof gets its general coats.
- Every bolt head cleaned, dressed and sealed, because forty years of movement has worked the hole oval
- Every side lap and end lap reinforced, because the sealing washers went hard decades ago
- Cracks bridged with reinforcement rather than filled with a rigid filler that will split again on the first hot day
- Ridge capping, valleys and all flashings detailed
- Vent pipes, extractor penetrations and any other roof furniture sealed around
Stage five: three coats, and why thickness is the product
The membrane is built up in three coats to a specified dry film thickness, each one allowed to cure before the next. Thickness is not a luxury version of the job, it is the job. A membrane at half the specified thickness is not half as waterproof, it is a film that will fail at the first point of movement.
Liquid rubber cures rather than dries, and it flexes with the sheet underneath it. That flexibility is why it survives on a substrate that expands and contracts every single day, where a rigid coating cracks along the corrugations.
Stage six: drainage, handover and the paperwork
A sealed roof that cannot drain has just moved the problem. Gutters and downpipes get checked and cleared so the water the membrane is now shedding actually leaves the building.
Then a walk through with the photographs, the product data sheets, the specification you were quoted against and the guarantee documentation. The 13 year system guarantee applies where the full system was specified and applied to certified thickness on a sound substrate. Individual products applied on their own carry 3 years, which is worth knowing if you are doing it yourself.
Common questions
No pressure
If you would like a second opinion on your own property, we will come and look.
The inspection is free, you get the findings in writing with photographs, and you are under no obligation to do anything with them.