Stoke Ferry Village Hall: a full roof strip back and replace

The brief

A village hall that had to stay a village hall

In late May 2025 AJB Group was awarded the opportunity to renovate the local village hall at Stoke Ferry in Norfolk, with a full strip back and replace of the roof. Village halls are not complicated buildings, but they are unusually difficult clients to work for, and for a reason that has nothing to do with carpentry: the hall is booked. Committee meetings, clubs, parties, classes and hire income all sit in a diary that was filled in months before the roof went out to quote.

That is the constraint that shapes the whole job. A roof replacement on an empty building can be sequenced for the convenience of the trades. A roof replacement on a hall in constant use has to be sequenced around the bookings, and it has to leave the building safe, dry and lockable at the end of every single day, not just at the end of the programme.

The second thing that shapes it is that a committee is spending money that the village raised. That tends to mean a tight budget, a short window and a very interested audience. AJB Group works to a standard that keeps opening doors to projects like this one, and building a reputation inside a community is exactly how a carpentry contractor gets asked back.

What we did

Full strip back

The works were a complete strip back and replace rather than a patch or an overlay. Covering, battens, felt and the existing roof structure came off, leaving the walls and the wall plate to work from. Stripping in full is the honest option on a building like this: once the old covering is off you can see what the plate and the wall head are actually doing, and any repair that is needed can be dealt with while there is clear access rather than discovered two winters later.

On an occupied building the strip is the highest risk part of the job. It gets planned so that nothing is opened up that cannot be made safe and weathertight again the same day, with the debris route and the drop zone set out before the first tile is lifted.

A brand new trussed roof

The replacement went back on as a new trussed roof, which is the right call for a hall of this type. A village hall is typically a wide, simple rectangle with no need for habitable roof space, and that is precisely the geometry a trussed roof is designed for. Trusses arrive engineered to the span, they go up quickly, and they get the building back under cover faster than a hand cut roof would on the same footprint. Speed under cover is not a shortcut here, it is the whole point: every extra day the building is open is another day of risk and another day the hall cannot be booked.

The trade-off is that trusses have to be set out, spaced, braced and strapped exactly as designed. A truss is only as good as its bracing, and the temptation on a fast job is to fix them upright and start battening. The bracing pattern is what stops the whole set folding, and it goes in as the trusses go up, not afterwards.

Worked around the timetable

The carpenters worked to get the job done efficiently and to the highest standards while minimising disruption to the hall's busy schedule. That is the sentence a village hall committee actually needs to read before they appoint anybody. Efficiency on this kind of contract is a courtesy, not a boast.

One contractor for the whole roof

Stripping, structure and covering sat with one contractor rather than being split between a roofer and a carpenter. On a small building that split is where the delays come from: the carpenter cannot start until the strip is done, the roofer cannot start until the structure is finished, and each one is waiting on somebody else's programme. Handing the whole roofing carpentry package to one team removes the interface entirely.