Plastering in Bearwood
Skimming, ceilings, dry lining repairs and external render across Bearwood and BH11. Free visit, itemised written quote.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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About a third of Bearwood went up in the eighties, with plasterboard on dabs and a thin skim, not solid plaster. In those houses a tired room is often a skim, not a replaster, and a hollow-sounding wall in one of them is normal and no cause for worry.
A Bearwood room needs a plasterer when a crack keeps opening on the same line, a corner bead is showing, or building work has left making good to do. A crack has opened along the same dead straight line it always comes back on, usually over a door or where the wall meets the ceiling. A corner has been knocked through by a pushchair or a hoover once too often and the metal bead underneath is showing.
Or a room is being changed, a wall out, a garage taken in, an ensuite put in a bedroom, and the making good is the bit nobody has costed. We are five miles away, the site visit is free, and you get the price in writing before anybody touches a wall.
The work
These houses crack in the same three places
Skimming a room over what is already there. What most walls on this estate need. The boards are sound and the wall just looks tired. We prepare the wall, flatten the joints, PVA it where the suction is high, and put two passes of finish coat on with a trowel.
Eighties ceilings are plasterboard finished with tape and joint, and a fair number were given an artex swirl in the same decade. Both take a skim provided the boards are properly fixed, so we screw off anything that has lifted, seal it and float the finish on. Where the texture is deep, overboarding first is quicker than fighting it.
Bearwood cracks run along the board joints. A straight line over a door head, another where the ceiling meets the wall, sometimes a run down the middle of a long wall. That is a taped joint that has moved, not the building moving. The repair is to rake it out, re-tape, fill and feather. Filling it and painting over it is why it keeps coming back. Where a galvanised angle bead has been caught by damp in a bathroom it rusts under the finish and pushes rust coloured spots through the paint, and it has to be cut out and replaced with a stainless or plastic bead, not filled over.
Terraces make up nearly a third of the houses in Bearwood, and two alterations suit them well: a chimney breast coming out and a kitchen opened into a dining room. Both go through building control for the beam, and both leave a new reveal, a new soffit and two rooms whose plaster no longer matches, which is why they usually end as a full skim rather than a patch. A stud partition to form an ensuite is boarded, taped and skimmed, and an ensuite needs its extract fan sorted under Approved Document F before it is boarded in. Integral garages here turn into offices and bedrooms more than anything else, and a board that is soft and springy under your hand is water, not age.
Outside it is mostly brick, with render on gables and porch cheeks and the odd pebbledash panel left from the original build. A crack tracking down from a window corner, and a patch that drums where sand and cement has parted from the blockwork, are the usual failures. Patches are cut back to sound material, keyed with a scratch coat and brought level in a render coat, while a whole elevation that has parted comes off and goes back under a silicone thin coat. Almost all of Bearwood is post-war, so lime on lath is rare and the finish options seldom narrow the way they do on an old solid wall, the listed buildings on Poole Lane and Knighton Lane aside. For the outside walls, see rendering in Bearwood.
How it runs
Skimming dry-lined walls and textured ceilings
Thomas comes out and looks at the walls and ceilings himself. In houses of this age most walls are plasterboard fixed on dabs, and many ceilings were finished in a textured coating, so he checks for loose boards, cracked joints and hollow patches. The quote lists protecting the room, stripping or overboarding, any new plasterboard or backing coat, beads, the finish coat, making good, and disposal, each on a separate line.
Each stage is priced on the one quote. Floors and furniture are sheeted, the route from the front door is protected, and waste is bagged and taken with us. Each evening the room is tidied. If something turns up behind the old finish that nobody could have seen, such as a damp patch or a board hanging off its dabs, we stop and show you a photograph with a price.
Plastering inside your own home is not development, and outside, re-rendering in a similar finish is normally permitted development. No conservation area covers Bearwood and only three listed entries sit near it, though the council keeps the list. A garage conversion or a knock-through goes to BCP Council building control, and we will tell you on the visit if yours does.
Cost
Board, bonding or a straight skim: the price of a room
We do not price plastering per square metre. What is on the wall now decides the work. Board or solid wall. A sound dry-lined wall only needs its joints taped and a skim. A board that has come off its dabs has to be refixed or replaced. Where plaster on a block wall has blown, the backing coat comes off and goes on again in bonding, browning or hardwall before the skim.
Ceilings. Textured coatings such as artex applied before 2000 can contain asbestos, so a sample is tested before anyone scrapes or sands one. Usually we skim over it or overboard it with plasterboard instead of taking it off, which is quicker and safer.
Getting in and out. A mid terrace where every bag of waste leaves through the front door, a semi with a side gate, and a flat above a shared hallway are different jobs before we start.
Outside. A gable wants a tower or a scaffold, priced on its own line.
Drying time. A skim over board dries quicker than a full backing coat, which matters if you have a date to decorate.
Ask any other quote if they are skimming or fully replastering, whether the artex is being tested, and who takes the waste away.
If it has come down
A board gone soft, or a ceiling coming down
A ceiling that has cracked and dropped, or come down altogether, means everyone out of that room, and the lights on that circuit off if there is water about. Phone us; the form will not be quick enough.
In dry-lined houses like these the warning sign is a board gone soft or springy, which nearly always means water from above: a bathroom leak, a tank or the roof. On the first visit we make the ceiling safe, take down anything loose and trace the water before pricing the repair. Our scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. If no one can answer, a call back follows once we are free.
Worth knowing
Most walls in Bearwood are hollow, and that is not a fault
Knock on a wall in a house of this age and you get a drum rather than a thud. That is dot and dab: plasterboard stuck to the blockwork on dabs of adhesive with an inch or so of air behind it, then a skim over the top.
It became the normal way to line a wall in the eighties, and about a third of Bearwood went up in that decade. It is not a defect and it is not thin plaster. It does change how you fix things to the wall, how you read a crack and where the cold spots come from, and all of that is worth knowing before you book.
Fixings first. A plasterboard plug in a hollow wall will pull out with a shelf on it, let alone a television, so you want a fixing long enough to reach the block behind or a proper hollow-wall anchor. Cracks second: a hairline crack that runs dead straight is a board joint, not the house, and it wants taping, not replastering. Cold spots third, and this is the one worth knowing.
Air can move around in the gap behind the boards where the dabs were not run continuously round the edges, which is why mould shows up in one corner of an outside wall and nowhere else in the room. If boards are coming off that wall anyway, sealing the perimeter properly on the way back costs almost nothing and fixes it for good. What we will not do is dab fresh board over a wall that is wet, because that hides the problem and it always comes back.
Who you are dealing with
Plastering by a registered company you can check
We plaster homes in Bearwood, 5 miles from our base in Boscombe, and in Merley, Kinson, Wallisdown, Broadstone and the rest of BH11. Building control here is BCP Council's. The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, and the business is Thomas Hannen's. Before you book a visit in Bearwood, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Thomas comes to look at the walls before he sets the price. Checkatrade shows a 10 out of 10 from a verified customer. The visit is free, as is the written quote, which itemises each part.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Bearwood?
Most repairs in Bearwood 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.
| Question | In Bearwood |
|---|---|
| Who decides | BCP Council is the planning authority for Bearwood. BCP Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Bearwood, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Bearwood. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Bearwood. |
Questions
Questions about plastering in Bearwood
Are there any lath and plaster ceilings in Bearwood?
Very few. Almost all of Bearwood is post-war, so lath and lime turns up mainly in the listed older buildings on Poole Lane and Knighton Lane, which want lime. Elsewhere, ceilings are plasterboard on joists, sometimes with a textured coating over them. That makes the work more predictable, because the board is a known thickness and the fixings sit at known centres. We still open a small area up before pricing.
Our house is mid eighties. Are the walls dry lined?
Very likely, yes: the 1980s alone account for 34.6% of Bearwood, and 37.0% of the stock went up between 1983 and 2008, so plasterboard on dabs is the local standard. That means a drummy sound across most of a wall is normal rather than a fault. It also means a heavy fixing needs a plug long enough to reach the blockwork behind the board, or it will pull the board face off.
We are in a terrace. What will the neighbours hear?
More than they would like, for a day. Terraces make up 28.9% of Bearwood, so a party wall is common here, and stripping old plaster off your own face of one carries straight through as knocking. We work off the wall rather than into it, and we give the neighbour notice of the noisy day so they can plan around it. Dust stays on our side, sheeted and bagged as we go.
Are there listed buildings in Bearwood we should know about?
Three entries across the area, and no conservation area over it. For the great majority of houses in Bearwood that means the outside finish is your own decision, with Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole as the authority if anything did need an application. Check your own address against the list if the building is one of the older ones on the edge of the settlement, then get on with it.
What do you check before pricing a ceiling replacement?
Whether the boards are still holding. I tap across the ceiling for movement, look at the direction of the joists, check the loft side for anything stored on top of the plasterboard, and look at the state of the joint tape. If the boards are sound the ceiling gets over boarded or skimmed. If they are sagging between the joists they come down, which changes both the scope and the mess.
Nearby, and next door
Plastering near Bearwood
Nearby places we also cover for plastering, with straight-line distances from Bearwood, and the other trades we offer in Bearwood itself.
Plastering nearby
Our other trades in Bearwood
Plastering and rendering guides
Silicone, cement or lime: which render? Cracked render: which cracks matter Hollow-sounding wall: blown plaster or dot and dabEverything we do in Kinson Plastering, all areas Every area we cover
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Tell us which rooms and what you have noticed. We will come and look, and put an itemised price in writing. No charge either way.