The roof over the bench, after the wet

The building we pour from is older than the tea trade in this street. Every autumn, once the wet season eases, we have the roof looked at properly.

The tea room sits in a brick terrace that has stood on Illawarra Road since the 1890s. It has been a grocer, a cobbler, a framing shop, and for the last stretch, our bench. The walls are sound. The roof, like every old roof in the inner west, asks for attention each year once the summer storms have finished throwing themselves at it.

Marrickville gets the worst of the easterly weather, and the terraces along here all share the same tired terracotta and the same century-old box gutters that block with leaf litter and back up into the ceiling if no one looks. We learned this the expensive way in our first winter, when a slow leak found its way down a wall and ruined a shelf of carefully dried chamomile.

These days we do not climb up there ourselves and we do not send anyone up a ladder for a guess. Once the wet season eases we have a company run a set of drone inspections across the roofline, the valleys, and the box gutters, and they send back a clear report of what needs clearing and what needs a tradesman. It takes an afternoon instead of a day, and nobody risks a fall on wet terracotta.

The report this year was kind. Two cracked tiles on the southern pitch, a gutter run that needs clearing before next summer, and a flashing detail near the chimney to keep an eye on. Small things, caught early, which is the whole point of looking before the leak finds the chamomile.

An old building is a long conversation. You keep the roof honest, you keep the leaf dry, and the bench keeps pouring. That is most of the trick to running a small tea room in a hundred-year-old terrace, and the rest is just remembering to warm the pot.