Plastering in Bournemouth

The bay-fronted houses. The streets around Charminster and Winton are full of them, built much the same way: brick walls with a browning or hardwall backing coat and a finish over it, lath and plaster to the upstairs ceilings, coving or a picture rail, and a bay at the front. The bay is the awkward part. Three windows means six reveals, none of the angles are square, and it wants a stop bead at every frame and an angle bead on every return or the edges break up within a year. Elsewhere it is ordinary work: take off whatever sounds hollow, a bonding coat on the patches, PVA where the suction is high, then skim the room as one surface.

Upstairs in these houses is usually lath and plaster and downstairs is often plasterboard with an artex finish from a later decade. A sound lath ceiling can be fixed back to the joists and skimmed. One that sags under your hand comes down and goes back in board with tape and joint. Artex takes a skim once sealed, or gets overboarded where the texture is deep, and we do not sand it, because anything put up before 2000 may contain asbestos.

Stained chimney breasts. We get this one constantly around here. A fireplace was blocked up years ago, the flue capped at the top with nothing left to ventilate it, and now damp and soot salts are pulling through the plaster and colouring your paint brown or yellow. Sealing it with paint never works. The flue wants a vent at both ends first, then the affected plaster comes off and goes back with a backing coat made to hold salts back, or a board on battens with a gap behind it.

Half the homes on this patch are flats, and a lot of them are these same houses divided up. That work is dry lining and stud partitions, but the ceiling between two flats is a fire and sound separating floor: it goes back as a proper build-up, not one sheet of board, and building control holds it to the fire and sound standards rather than to whatever was there before. Outside, being under three kilometres from the water changes the specification rather than the method. Salt air keeps a wall damp between showers and eats galvanised beads and fixings from the edge in, so beads want to be stainless or plastic. A tired elevation is better recoated over a mesh basecoat with a primer and a silicone thin coat, or a monocouche where you want the colour carried through the material rather than painted onto it.

No rate per square metre, because the square metres are the easiest thing to measure and the least useful thing to know. A sound wall that only wants a skim is a different job from one where the backing coat has blown and has to come off back to the masonry. A bay-fronted semi with a side alley, a top floor flat up two flights with a turn in the stairs, and a house split into three where everything comes past somebody else's front door are three different jobs before we start. Outside, a bay or a gable brings a tower or a scaffold in as its own line. Ask any quote who moves the furniture, and how long it wants for drying before a mist coat goes on and you can decorate.

We cover Charminster, Winton, Springbourne, Queen's Park, Littledown and the rest of BH8. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free.