Plastering in Sandford
Ceilings, skimming, corner repairs and external render for the post-war houses between Wareham and Holton Heath.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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Most walls in Sandford do not need replastering. Three houses in five here went up between the war and the early eighties, and that means solid plastered blockwork that is usually still stuck fast. Knock it: a dull, solid note means a skim over the top will give you flat, paintable walls for a fraction of a strip out. A hollow drumming note over one area means the plaster has let go there, and that patch has to come off.
Sandford houses crack along textured ceilings, burst at external corners and go soft or mouldy after leaks and in cold corners. A textured ceiling, put on when the house was fairly new, that has started to crack in a straight line along the board joints. An external corner where the plaster has burst and there is a rusty metal edge showing through. And a wall gone soft and blown after a leak, or dark and patchy with mould in a cold corner behind the furniture.
All of it is our work, inside and out, and the making good comes with the job. The site visit is free, the written quote is itemised, and if half a day of patching will do we will say so, and we will not price a room.
The work
The cold corner behind the wardrobe is condensation
Ceilings, which is where the houses here show their age. Six houses in ten in Sandford went up between 1945 and 1982, peaking in the late sixties and early seventies, so the ceilings are plasterboard with scrimmed joints and a great many had Artex rolled over the top a decade later.
The joints move and the crack telegraphs through in a dead straight line. Where the coating is shallow and stuck fast we prepare it and skim straight over. Where it is heavy swirl, or somebody has patched round a light fitting, over-boarding and taping the joints gives a flatter ceiling for very little more. Anything textured from before 2000 can hold a trace of asbestos, so it is sampled rather than sanded.
The walls are solid plaster on blockwork, not dry lining, so one here behaves differently from a wall in a newer house. Sound walls get sealed and two coats of finish laid on with a trowel. Once it has gone off and dried right through, the wall takes a thinned mist coat before you decorate, because fresh plaster drinks the first coat of emulsion and shows every roller mark otherwise. Where the plaster has blown it comes off back to the block and a backing coat goes on first, browning or hardwall on solid work and bonding where the background is a patchwork, floated out and ruled straight.
Corners that have burst. Very common in stock of this age. The external corners and window reveals were formed with a galvanised angle bead buried in the plaster. Where damp has reached it the metal corrodes, swells and pushes the plaster off the arris, so you get a line of cracking down a corner with a rusty edge behind it. Filling does nothing. The bead is cut out, a new one fixed, and the corner made good and run in, which is an afternoon, not a project.
A wall that is dark, spotted and cold in one corner behind a wardrobe is usually condensation rather than a plastering fault. The fabric of this era is not generous with insulation and the ground round here is wet heathland sand, so warm damp air finds the coldest surface. We say when the answer is ventilation and heat rather than plaster, and Approved Document F sets out what a room is meant to have. Outside, the rendered gables and panels of pebbledash and Tyrolean are nearly all sand and cement: local damage is cut out square and patched in a matching mix, and a failed elevation is stripped and put back as a silicone thin coat or a monocouche, which is coloured through and never needs painting, off a bell cast bead at the base. On the handful of older cottages in the parish a solid wall wants lime inside and a soft render outside. For the outside walls, see rendering in Sandford.
How it runs
Replastering a room, from survey to dry walls
Thomas comes and looks at the rooms, taps the walls and checks the ceilings, because a ceiling that only needs a skim and one that wants over-boarding look the same in a photo.
In Sandford's sixties and seventies houses the walls are usually gypsum plaster on block or brick, and many ceilings still carry an old textured coating. The price shows dust protection, what has to come off, new plasterboard where it is needed, any backing coat, the finish, angle beads, and the fiddly making good round switches and door linings. The plastering is covered by that one quote.
Floors and furniture are covered, and dust sheets go down along the route to the door. Nothing is left half stripped overnight, and the room is swept each day. Old plaster and board offcuts leave with us. If a wall blows once the old skim is off, we stop, photograph it and tell you what it adds.
Inside, there is nothing to apply for on an ordinary house. No conservation area covers the village and only four entries in Sandford are listed, so the outside finish is your choice too. Planning Portal guidance on external walls sets out where that stops, and on a listed building listed building consent reaches inside as well. Textured coatings put up before 2000 can contain asbestos, so we have one tested before anyone sands or scrapes it.
Cost
Skim, board or hack off: what sets the plastering price
We do not quote plastering by the square metre. What is behind the finish decides the work. Skim or more. Sound plaster takes a skim coat. A wall that has blown has to come off, which brings a backing coat and a float back into the job and adds drying time.
Ceilings. A textured ceiling can be skimmed if it is sound and tests clear. Over-boarding with plasterboard and then skimming costs more but takes the old coating out of the argument. A ceiling that has dropped away from the joists is taken down.
The room. An empty room is quicker. Coving, picture rails, radiators to take off and sockets to ease out all add time.
Outside work. Rendering or plastering a gable needs a scaffold, which work at height rules make its own line. Renewing a whole elevation counts as renovating a thermal element, so Approved Document L may ask for insulation behind it.
Ask any other plasterer whether the ceiling is being skimmed or boarded, whether the textured coating is being tested, what backing coat goes on a blown wall, and who makes good around frames and sockets.
If it has started to come down
A ceiling bowing, or plaster coming off in sheets
If a ceiling has started to bow, from a burst pipe, a leaking tank in the loft or a roof leak, get everyone out of the room and do not push at it.
Turn the water off at the stopcock if it is a pipe, and the lights on that circuit if water is near a fitting. Plaster coming off a wall in sheets is less dangerous but still needs clearing. The first visit makes it safe by taking down what is loose and propping or boarding what is left, and then we price the repair. We are 11.7 miles away on the Wareham road. Booked plastering runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For a ceiling coming down, pick up the phone. The online form is too slow for that. If your call is not picked up, we phone you back at the earliest moment.
Worth knowing
The whole village was plastered in the same few years
Three houses in five in Sandford were built between the war and the early eighties, most of them in a tight run either side of 1970. That is unusual, and it is the one local thing that genuinely changes what you should expect.
It means the interiors are all the same age: the same plasterboard ceilings with the same scrimmed joints, the same solid backing coat on blockwork, the same galvanised beads on the corners, and, in a great many of them, the same textured coating applied at roughly the same time.
Materials fail on a timetable, so the faults arrive together. When one house on a street has a crack running dead straight across the ceiling, the neighbours usually do too, and it is not subsidence, it is the board joints doing what board joints do.
The useful part is that it makes the job predictable and it makes prices comparable. If your neighbour has had a ceiling over-boarded and skimmed, yours is very likely the same piece of work, and their experience is worth more to you than a general enquiry online. It also means doing the whole ceiling is often better value than chasing one crack, because the next joint will go the same way inside a year or two.
Where it cuts the other way is the corner beads and the cold corners: a house that has been re-rendered or had the cavity filled will behave differently from the one next door that has not, so we still look before we price rather than assuming your house is a copy of the last one we did.
Who you are dealing with
The plasterer you will actually meet
Sandford sits 11.7 miles from our base in Boscombe, Bournemouth. For plastering we cover this village, Holton Heath, Stoborough and Wareham itself across BH20, and on through Purbeck, Poole and east Dorset. Dorset Council is the local authority.
You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Thomas Hannen runs his own business here: he taps the walls and prices the job himself. One verified customer scored us 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. We do not charge for the visit or the itemised written quote. Before you book a visit in Sandford, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Sandford?
Most repairs in Sandford 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 Sandford |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Sandford. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Sandford, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, Sandford has listed buildings. If yours is one, or stands in the grounds of one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Sandford. |
Questions
Questions about plastering in Sandford
Why do the same cracks show up in every house here?
Because the street went up together. Six in ten Sandford homes were built between 1945 and 1982, with the biggest single run in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so the ceilings, the partitions and the plasterboard behind them are all the same age and reach the same point at once. Joint tape lifting at the same height in three houses along a row is that, not subsidence.
Is a 1970s Sandford ceiling likely to be lath or board?
Board, on almost all of it. Only about one home in twenty here predates 1919, so lath and horsehair is rare in Sandford and what you have is plasterboard on joists with a skim or a textured finish over the top. That matters to the price and the programme, because a boarded ceiling can usually be over-boarded and skimmed rather than stripped, and the joists rarely need the extra fixing an old lath ceiling wants.
Does the Poole Harbour nutrient rule stop us adding a bedroom?
No, not in your own house. Sandford drains to Poole Harbour, which is protected for nutrients, and the rule bites where a scheme creates a new dwelling or a separate unit. Turning the garage into a bedroom for your own household does not engage it, and nor does replastering a bedroom. If it is becoming a self-contained annexe, get that settled with Dorset Council before the studwork goes up, because the wet trades come last and are the cheapest part of the job to delay.
What do you actually check before quoting a re-skim?
I tap the whole wall, not one corner of it. On the post-war Sandford stock the failures run to a pattern: blown patches around a blocked-up fireplace opening, tape lifting where a 1970s partition meets the ceiling, and a soft band low down on any wall that has had a leaking waste pipe behind it. I mark those on the sketch and price the make-good as its own line, where you can see it.
Can I tell from inside whether the plaster has blown?
Knuckle down the wall and listen to it. A sound backing coat gives a dull thud, a blown one rings and sometimes shifts slightly under your hand. The usual pattern in Sandford is a hollow band about a metre up on an external wall, which is a plaster problem, as against a ceiling that drums right across, which is more often the board fixings letting go. Mark what you find in pencil and I will check it against the meter.
Nearby, and next door
Plastering near Sandford
Nearby places we also cover for plastering, with straight-line distances from Sandford, and the other trades we offer in Sandford itself.
Plastering nearby
Our other trades in Sandford
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Tell us which room, or send a photo of the ceiling, and we will book a look. The visit and the written quote cost nothing.