Plastering in Lover
Plaster inside and render outside, across Lover, Redlynch and the SP5 lanes. We sound the wall before we price it, and the quote comes in writing.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Inside your house is your own business here and needs no permission from anybody. Outside is different: Lover sits inside the New Forest National Park, and rendering an elevation that is bare brick today needs an application first, even though repairing render you already have does not.
People ring us here for three sorts of thing. A room in an older cottage where the plaster has blown low down on the wall and the paint keeps lifting above the skirting. A ceiling that has cracked or been damaged, often after a leak nobody spotted for a fortnight.
And the work that comes with an outbuilding or an extension being turned into somewhere you can sit, which is boarding, skimming and getting the corners straight. We come out, sound the walls and the ceiling, and say which of those you have. We are about twenty miles out, so we plan jobs this side of the Forest in runs and will give you a real date rather than a vague week.
The work
The answer changes by address, not by village
The answer changes by address, not by village. A good quarter of the houses in this corner were up before 1919, solid brick with no cavity, plastered in lime straight onto the wall. When that plaster blows it goes at the bottom of the wall, because a solid wall dries through its own surface and a hard gypsum backing coat blocks the way out. We take off only what has let go, put a haired lime backing coat back and finish it breathable, which is what the lime plaster on that wall was doing in the first place. On the post-war houses along the lanes the same wall is a cavity and gypsum is right, so the answer changes by address rather than by village.
Chimney breasts and woodburners. Off the gas main, a lot of houses here heat with wood or oil, and a new liner and register plate usually leaves a chimney breast that wants making good. The recess and the area round the flue get a cement based backing rather than a gypsum one, because gypsum will not sit against that sort of heat, and the finish comes back level with the rest of the wall. Hairline cracks along the breast after the first winter of a new stove are a patch, not a rebuild.
In the cottages the ceiling is riven lath with the plaster keyed through it, and what fails is the key rather than the surface. If most of it has gone it comes down, goes back in plasterboard and is skimmed. If it is sound and only tired we fix it from above and skim over, which is the cheaper answer more often than people think. Artex on the newer ceilings skims flat, and we never sand it.
Old stores and workshops turned into offices and spare rooms take dry lining on insulated plasterboard, fixed on dabs where the wall is solid, stud partitions, then tape and joint or a full skim, with angle bead on the corners and stop bead at every reveal. Anything that becomes a heated room brings building control with it. Outside there is painted sand and cement on brick, pebbledash on the post-war houses and lime render on the oldest walls, and all of them crack and go hollow at the top of the wall first: cut out, primed and repaired where the rest is sound, or taken back and put on again as a mesh reinforced basecoat with a silicone thin coat topcoat, or a through-coloured monocouche where you want no painting at all, over a bell cast bead with the scaffold priced separately.
How it runs
From your call to a written price
It starts with a free site visit and a survey of every wall and ceiling in the rooms concerned, and an itemised quote. Nothing you do inside needs planning permission, there is no conservation area over the village itself, and repairing what is already on the outside is repair. There are only a handful of listed buildings within a mile, but if yours is one of them consent reaches internal plaster as well as the front wall, and National Park heritage and conservation guidance is the place to start. Building control comes in when a room is created or an elevation is re-rendered, because Approved Document L treats that as renovating a thermal element. The National Park Authority is the planning authority here, not the district council.
Cost
What decides the price
There is no useful rate per square metre. Solid brick with lime behind the plaster, a cavity wall with sound gypsum on it, and an outbuilding that has never been lined are three different prices for the same number of square metres. A cottage on the lane with the van half on the verge, a bungalow with a gravel turning space, and a converted store at the end of a long track are three more before a bag is opened. Ask what backing coat is going on and why, and who takes the waste.
If it has just gone
A ceiling down, or a wall that has let go
Ring rather than use the form. A ceiling that has dropped, or render off a gable, goes to the front of the queue. We are about twenty miles from you, so we will get out to make it safe within a day or so even when the finishing work has to wait for the next run this way. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
Worth knowing
Render is not automatic inside the National Park
This is the one thing about working on the outside of a house here that catches people out. Almost everywhere else in the country you can render or clad a wall without asking anyone, because it counts as permitted development. Inside a National Park you cannot. Lover sits within the New Forest boundary, so putting render on an elevation that is bare brick today is a planning application, and the National Park Authority decides it rather than the council you pay your tax to.
Their interactive property map is the quickest way to see exactly where your address sits, because the boundary runs through this area rather than around it.
What that changes is the order of things and the time of year. Repairing or renewing render already on the wall needs nothing, so most render jobs here start when you want them to. A change of finish does not: allow a couple of months from asking to starting, which means deciding in winter to work in spring.
The Authority is looking at how it will look, so the colour and the texture of the system matter to the answer, and insulated render, which thickens the wall and changes the reveals and the eaves, is a bigger ask than a thin coat over the brick. We will not order materials until it is granted, and none of this touches the work inside.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We cover Lover, Redlynch, Morgans Vale, Woodfalls, Nomansland and Downton across SP5 and the western edge of the Forest. 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.
Questions
Lover questions we get asked
Are we too far out at Lover for you to come?
Lover is 19.6 miles from the base, a longer run than most but well inside the area we work. What it changes is scheduling rather than whether we take the job on. Work out here gets booked in a block so materials arrive in one load and the days run consecutively instead of scattered across a fortnight. Thomas still comes out first, looks at it and writes the quote up, at no charge.
Will a gypsum backing coat hold on our old cottage wall?
Not on a wall that has to breathe, and 27.7% of the housing around Lover predates 1919, with pre-1900 the biggest single group at 24.4%. Those are solid walls without a cavity, so moisture that gets in has to come back out through the surface. A hard cement or gypsum backing shuts that route, and the damp finds a weaker one instead, usually pushing the finish off at skirting level.
This far inland, is frost worse for render than salt?
It is. At 26.9km from the coast salt is not what attacks a wall here, but the exposed face still looks south west and takes the driven rain, and inland nights get colder than they do on the shore. Render or plaster that is still green when it freezes loses its strength for good and crumbles at the surface the following spring. That is why external work waits on the forecast.
The National Park covers Lover. Does outside work need approval?
It depends what you are doing to the outside, and the New Forest National Park Authority is who decides. Lover has no conservation area of its own and only 8 listed entries in the area, so most houses here escape the tighter controls. Repairing or renewing an existing render in the same material and colour is maintenance. A new look on a visible elevation is worth a conversation before you commit.
Does adding an annexe here bring in the Solent rules?
If it is somewhere for people to sleep, yes. Land here drains towards the Solent, and the nutrient rules apply to schemes that add overnight accommodation, so a self contained annexe engages them where a workshop or a store would not. It gets dealt with at planning stage and has nothing to do with the plastering itself. We come in once the permission is settled and the shell is up.
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Tell us the address and what you have noticed. We will come out, sound the walls, and put an itemised price in writing. No charge, and no obligation.