Plastering in Lilliput

A skim suits sound plaster. Where the plaster underneath is sound, a skim is the quick answer. The wall is cleaned, loose paint scraped back, a PVA or bonding primer goes on, and a two coat finish is laid and trowelled flat. Artex on a ceiling can usually be skimmed over once it is sealed, and we test old textured coatings before anyone sands or scrapes them. A room is usually a day, sometimes two.

Ceilings. A crack along a board joint is a tape and skim job. A sag or a bulge is not: it means the plaster has let go of the lath, or the plasterboard has lost its fixings, and it gets taken down under dust sheets and replaced with new plasterboard, screwed to the joists and taped before the finish coat. Lath and lime ceilings in older Lilliput houses are sometimes worth saving. We will say which yours is.

Walls that have blown. Plaster that sounds hollow has parted from the wall behind. It is cut back to a sound edge, the background is prepared, and the patch is built up with a backing coat of bonding or hardwall, then a float coat and finish, so the repair sits flush. New angle bead goes on every corner and reveal we touch, and a stop bead where plaster meets another surface.

Dry lining. For a room with uneven walls, or after a chimney breast comes out, plasterboard on dot and dab or a timber stud gives a flat surface fast. Joints are taped and jointed, or the whole board is skimmed.

Damp walls. Replastering a wet wall only buys you time. On the elevation of a Lilliput house that takes the weather we look outside first: the render, the sills, the gutters and the pointing. Once the water is stopped, the wall is replastered with a backing that suits it, which on a solid or older wall means a breathable lime plaster rather than gypsum.

Outside render repairs. Blown sand and cement is hacked off, the edge cut square, and the patch built up in a scratch coat, a basecoat and a topcoat with a bell cast over the damp course. Pebbledash and silicone thin coat finishes are matched to what is there.

After we leave. New plaster needs to dry before you decorate. Allow a couple of weeks in a warm room, then a mist coat of thinned emulsion before the paint.

No rate per square metre, because two rooms of the same size can be a day apart once you have seen the walls.

Getting to it. A ground floor room in a house with a drive off Lilliput Road, a first floor flat reached up a shared stair, and a tall rear wall above a stepped garden on the slope to the harbour call for different access and protection. Ceilings and stairwells need a platform, and a room you are still living in needs protecting rather than emptying. Where the work is at height the work at height rules apply just as they do on a roof.

What is behind it. Skimming over sound plaster is a different job from taking a wall back to brick, and you often cannot tell which you have until something is tapped. Lath and lime, old bonding, dot and dab and bare block all take different preparation and a different number of coats.

The awkward parts. Reveals, beads, stop ends, arches, curved walls and getting a flat finish where an old ceiling has dropped. The middle of a wall is quick. The edges are where the day goes.

Comparing quotes? Ask how many coats are included, whether the walls are being skimmed or taken back, whether beads and making good are in the price, and who moves and protects the furniture.

We plaster across Lilliput and the rest of BH14, along Sandbanks Road and Lilliput Road to Evening Hill and Salterns, and on to Whitecliff, Canford Cliffs and Penn Hill, from our base in Boscombe, about five miles away. BCP Council is the planning and building control authority.

You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, the trading name of 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. Before you book a visit in Lilliput, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Lilliput 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.