Plastering in Broadstone
Ceilings, walls and render across Broadstone and BH18, checked by hand before they are priced and itemised in writing.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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In most Broadstone houses the ceiling is the job. Bungalows have the whole floor plan overhead, not one storey of it, so what a plastering quote here really turns on is how many ceilings are coming down and how many are being boarded over.
Plaster problems in Broadstone are fairly consistent. A ceiling has cracked or stained and somebody wants to know whether it is a leak, the loft or just age. A bungalow has been bought to modernise and every room needs skimming before the decorator starts. Or the render on a gable has hairlined and is coming away in patches.
We go through it with you room by room, tapping walls and ceilings to sort what is tired from what has let go, and putting our head into the loft where there is access, because a lot of bungalow ceiling problems are settled up there, not down here. Then you get an itemised written price. If a surface can be saved with a skim we say so, and you do not pay for a new ceiling.
The work
Most damp patches here are condensation
Ceilings, and plenty of them. Overboarding and skimming is the usual answer here: fresh plasterboard screwed through the old surface into the joists, joints taped, then two passes of finish coat. That deals with a cracked ceiling, a textured coating you want gone and a ceiling papered too many times in one operation. Where a ceiling has failed and is loose it comes down instead, and we check the joists and the wiring before anything goes up.
Most of Broadstone went up in one short stretch after the war, 63.1% of it between 1945 and 1982 and a quarter of the whole place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Those walls are a dense sand and cement float coat with a thin gypsum finish over it. That background is hard and it does not drink like a modern block wall, so it wants preparing properly and sealing with PVA before a skim. Wetting it and hoping does not work. Where the float coat itself sounds hollow it comes off and a backing coat in bonding or hardwall goes back first.
Patching after the alterations everybody does here. Chimney breasts taken out, fireplaces opened up, serving hatches filled in, a wall knocked through between kitchen and dining room. Each leaves an edge, and making good across it is the difference between a repair you can see from the doorway and one you cannot. With 42.0% of the housing single storey, a big loft is the obvious place to put another room and a wide garage the obvious place to put one more: stud partitions boarded and finished in tape and joint or a full skim, board on dot and dab where the blockwork is true enough, sloping ceilings and dormer cheeks lined out, and bead on every corner and reveal.
Render here is mostly original sand and cement with the odd pebbledash panel, painted more than once, and it fails in the same places: the corners of openings, the bottom courses where the ground splashes them, and the panel over a bay. Small areas are cut out and made good in a matching mix; a whole elevation comes back as a primer, a mesh-reinforced basecoat and a silicone thin coat, or a monocouche where the colour runs through the material, with a bell cast at the base. For the outside walls, see rendering in Broadstone. A dark cold stripe across a ceiling or the top of a wall in a bungalow is very often condensation on a cold spot rather than water coming in, and replastering that without fixing the cause puts a new surface on the same problem.
How it runs
Replastering bungalow ceilings and walls, room by room
Most plastering in Broadstone is inside a post-war bungalow or a flat in one of the low-rise blocks, so the ceilings are low and a room can be done off trestles. Thomas comes and taps the walls, looks at the ceilings for cracks along the board joints, and tells you whether it wants a skim over plasterboard or hacking off back to the blockwork.
The itemised quote covers prep, hacking off, backing coat, beads, finish coats, making good and waste. Broadstone jobs are priced and run by one company. Dust sheets go down and doorways are sheeted before a bag is opened, and the waste leaves with us each day. If a textured ceiling might be an older coating, we arrange a test before anybody sands or scrapes it. Damage that only shows once the old plaster is off is photographed and priced for you before we carry on.
Replastering needs no permission. Outside, changing the material or look of a render stops being maintenance, and the Planning Portal page on external walls covers when it needs permission. That carries more weight in the Ridgeway and Broadstone Park conservation area, and in the one around Tudor Road, both listed by BCP Council. Taking a whole external wall back to the blockwork is renovating a thermal element, which brings Approved Document L and building control in.
Cost
Skim, backing coat or new plasterboard?
We do not work to a rate per square metre. What sits behind the surface decides the job. What is on the wall now. Plaster still firmly stuck takes a skim. Plaster that sounds hollow when tapped comes off, and that brings a backing coat and a second visit with it. On the blockwork used in a lot of post-war houses, the backing coat is often what makes the finish sit flat.
The ceilings. Many bungalow ceilings are plasterboard with a textured finish. Skimming over a sound textured ceiling is quicker than taking it down, but a ceiling sagging off its joists needs new plasterboard. Loose textured coatings are tested before anyone disturbs them, and that is priced separately.
Access and how much you use the room. Low ceilings mean trestles, not a tower. Outside, a render repair on a chalet gable needs a platform, and the work at height rules price that. A kitchen that has to stay in use costs more time than an empty bedroom.
Drying. New plaster needs time before a mist coat and decorating, and we tell you how long.
Ask any other quote whether a backing coat is included or only a skim, whether the beads are new, and who takes the waste.
If it has let go
A ceiling that has dropped or is bulging after a leak
Keep out of the room and shut the door. In a bungalow, the ceiling that comes down is usually the one under a leak in the roof or an old cold water tank beside the loft hatch, so turn that lighting circuit off at the consumer unit and get what you can out from under it.
Then ring. On the first visit we take down anything hanging, make the room safe and find where the water came from. We work booked jobs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For a ceiling down, use the phone and not the form, and if nobody is free to answer we ring back as soon as we can.
One local thing
Bungalow country, and what that does to the job
More than four in ten homes in Broadstone are bungalows, and that changes a plastering job more than any planning rule will. The obvious part is quantity: the ceilings cover the whole footprint of the house, so ceilings, not walls, are the biggest line on the quote. The less obvious part is what sits above them.
Every ceiling in a bungalow has a cold loft on the other side, which is why a crack or grey patch on a bungalow ceiling so often turns out to be condensation, not a leak. Before replastering one we want to see whether the insulation has been pushed hard into the eaves and blocked the ventilation, because if it has, a new ceiling will mark in the same places.
The same shape works in your favour on price. A bungalow can be done in one run while it is empty, with no stairwell to fight and no first floor to protect, so a whole house skimmed is far less disruptive here than in a two storey house. Outside, low eaves mean most elevations can be reached from a tower rather than a full scaffold, which takes real money off a re-render.
The catch is at the bottom of the wall: render on a bungalow often finishes close to the ground, where paving and borders splash it and keep it wet. We want a bell cast and a clear gap above the paving, and if we are only repairing we will say honestly whether the ground level is going to undo the work.
Who you are dealing with
The plasterer you meet is the owner
Plastering jobs from Broadstone to Upton, Merley, Corfe Mullen and Canford Heath are a 7.3 mile drive from our Boscombe base, and BCP Council is the building control authority. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, belongs to Thomas Hannen. Before you book a visit in Broadstone, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
He comes to tap the walls and price the room himself, so you talk to the owner from the start. There is a verified 10 out of 10 from one of our customers on Checkatrade. Both the visit and the written quote, itemised line by line, are free.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Broadstone?
Most repairs in Broadstone 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 Broadstone |
|---|---|
| Who decides | BCP Council is the planning authority for Broadstone. BCP Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | Yes: Ridgeway and Broadstone Park Conservation Area and Tudor Road and Golf Links Road Conservation Area. They cover parts of Broadstone, so check whether your street is inside one. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Broadstone. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Broadstone. |
Questions
Questions about plastering in Broadstone
Why do so many ceilings crack in Broadstone bungalows?
Because 42.0% of the dwellings here are bungalows, and a bungalow ceiling sits directly under the loft with nothing above it but rafters and cold air. Every truss moves a little with the seasons and the board joints follow. A straight line running along a row of screw heads is movement, not failure. We scrim and re-skim instead of pulling the ceiling down, unless the board itself has lost its fixings.
Is the plaster in a late 1950s Broadstone house lath?
Rarely: the peak building period in Broadstone is the late 1950s and early 1960s, some 25.0% of the stock, and by then walls were floated in sand and cement with a gypsum finish over brick or block. Ceilings are usually plasterboard with a thin skim on top. That matters because a boarded ceiling can be re-skimmed in place, whereas genuine lath and plaster has to come off first.
The surface water risk here is high. Does damp reach the plaster?
It can reach it, and it shows at low level first. Broadstone sits well back from the Stour, over two miles off, so river flooding is not the worry; the problem is surface water standing against a wall after heavy rain because it has nowhere to go. Plaster then blows in a band above the skirting. We want the drainage and the ground levels sorted before a new backing coat goes on.
Can I render the front of a Broadstone house?
Broadstone has two conservation areas near its centre, Ridgeway and Broadstone Park, and Tudor Road and Golf Links Road, and only four listed entries in the whole settlement. Outside those, on an ordinary house the render system and its colour are your choice. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole is the authority if anything does need asking, and inside a conservation area a change of finish is worth checking first. Building a wall out with insulation behind the render is a different question from recovering what is already there, so tell us which of the two you mean.
Do you need scaffold to render a single storey bungalow?
For a single storey wall we work off a low tower rather than a full scaffold, which keeps that line on the quote short. With 42.0% bungalows and another 37.8% detached, most Broadstone houses have somewhere off the road to stand the mixer and stack the boards. Where a wall runs tight to a boundary or a neighbour's drive, we say so at the visit and price the access properly.
Nearby, and next door
Plastering near Broadstone
Nearby places we also cover for plastering, with straight-line distances from Broadstone, and the other trades we offer in Broadstone itself.
Plastering nearby
Our other trades in Broadstone
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 Broadstone Plastering, all areas Every area we cover
Free quote
Ceiling looking tired?
Tell us the address and what it is doing. The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote.