Plastering in Ashmore

Lime plaster on lath, repaired where it stands. On the older houses in Ashmore the walls and ceilings are lime plaster spread over timber laths. It fails in a particular way: the keys, the squeezed out lumps that hold it on from behind, snap off, and the plaster starts to move as a sheet even though the face looks fine.

Where enough keys survive it can be stitched, re-fixed and skimmed. Where they have gone the section comes down, the laths are checked and replaced where they are split, and it goes back in a haired lime backing coat with a lime finish over it. In a listed room how that is done matters, because overboarding straight over historic fabric is not always acceptable even though it is quicker, and there are twenty-six listed entries in this village.

Solid walls that are wet. A solid wall has no cavity, so it takes rain in on the outside and gives it back on the inside, and everything on it has to let that happen. In a village like this, blown plaster very often sits behind a cement patch or a hard render somebody applied decades ago with the best of intentions. It gets cut out, the wall is allowed to dry, and it is made good in a breathable material, not the one that caused it. Cutting out a damp patch is the last job, not the first: we look at ground levels, a floor that has been sealed, or that hard render outside, deal with the cause, then patch so the repair does not reappear a foot to the left.

Not every wall in the village is two hundred years old. Extensions, annexes and the converted outbuildings get plasterboard on dot and dab or on a stud, moisture resistant board behind a shower, backing coats of bonding or hardwall chosen by the background, and angle bead and stop bead at the corners and reveals. Outside it is lime render and limewash on the old walls, which wants renewing in lime, never sealing over, and sand and cement or pebbledash on the twentieth century houses, repaired with a scratch coat and a mesh reinforced basecoat, then primer and topcoat with a bell cast bead at the bottom. The thin coat systems, silicone and monocouche, are excellent on a modern cavity wall and wrong on an old solid one, and we will tell you which you have before we quote for either. For the outside walls, see rendering in Ashmore.

Plastering is not priced per square metre here. The area is easy to measure and tells you least. Solid or hollow. We knock on every wall and ceiling. What answers solid gets a skim or a lime finish, and what drums comes off back to the background, whether stone, flint, brick or lath.

Lime or gypsum. On a solid wall that has to breathe, lime is the right choice, and it takes longer: more coats, longer between them, and hair or fibre in the backing coat on a lath ceiling.

Listed fabric. If the house is listed, the historic plaster is part of it, so repairs go in patch by patch and the wall is never stripped, which takes care and time.

The building. A listed cottage, a converted outbuilding on a yard and a later house on the edge of Ashmore are different jobs before anything is mixed. Materials come up the lanes, and at this distance the work is planned in whole days.

Ask any other plasterer what backing coat they will use and why that one, how long they leave between coats, and who takes the waste away.

We plaster homes in Ashmore and the SP5 villages up on the chalk, out to Sixpenny Handley, Tarrant Monkton and Blandford Forum, and our base in Boscombe is 19.7 miles from Ashmore. Dorset Council is the planning and building control authority.

The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Thomas Hannen, who owns it, knocks on your walls and prices the work himself. Our Checkatrade page shows one verified customer's 10 out of 10. The visit and the itemised written quote are both free. Before you book a visit in Ashmore, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Ashmore need no application at all. What decides whether a change to the outside of your house does is who the council is, whether a conservation area or a listing applies, and whether the place sits in a protected landscape.