The house:
3 bed semi with 2 chimneys. Internally, chimney breasts at the back of the house have both been removed. At the front of the house, only the downstairs breast has been removed (upstairs is still there in the bedroom.) Both front and back still have the brickwork in the loft.
Our neighbour says she hasn't heard any dripping on her side of the wall. The roof is less than 8 years old and chimneys were capped at the same time.
The issue(s):
Back of the house we noticed some damp spots on the bedroom ceiling and the living room wall. These have been very slow to appear.
Front of the house, we hear an occasional dripping sound whenever it rains, but can only hear it downstairs in the living room (below where the upstairs breast still sits.) There are no obvious damp spots anywhere that we can see.
Inside the loft, all the bricks seemed damp.
We wanted a roofer to fix the leak at the back, and stop the dripping sound at the front.
The roofers:
We contacted around 12 different roofing companies and got 10 different stories about what they problems were. Some of the problems they said they had found were common themselves, but overall no 2 companies said exactly the same thing.
The quotes ranged from £350 to £10k (the £10k was an obvious cowboy who started tutting and shaking his head when he entered the house and told us we needed a whole new roof before we had even told him the problem, he hadn't even looked at the roof!)
What we did:
We narrowed it down to 2 companies who said very similar things (but still not the same) and who gave what sounded like reasonable quotes. We invited them back to look again and then went with the guy who seemed friendliest/most honest (I know, I know, can't ever really tell! But what else were we supposed to do when everyone was giving us totally different stories?)
On the day of the repair:
They turned up, took a deposit, then started to work. About 10 minutes in, they came down and told us there was another problem and added £500 to the price. We know nothing about roofing but did a quick Google and seemed reasonable (although annoying they waited until the job started to tell us about it!) so we agreed. They finished, showed us photos of what they did, we paid the rest, they left. This was around early Feb this year.
Now....
The leak at the back seems to have stopped. We are happy with this and have repainted the ceiling.
In the loft, both chimneys now seem to have dried out. We are also happy with this and have started to use the loft for storage.
The dripping sound at the front is now worse than ever. More frequent and seems louder. We are very unhappy with this.
We have contacted the same company who said they carried out all of the repairs we agreed on, which is fair, but it hasn't fixed the initial problem we needed fixing. They have been paid in full and suggested that any more work that needs to be done is not covered by what has already been paid.
Can anyone provide any advice on what we can do next?