Plastering at Thorney Hill

If a wall answers dead, leave it alone. Four homes in ten here went up between the war and the early eighties, nearly all of them built the same way: a block inner leaf, a float coat straightened onto it, a gypsum finish over that. Fifty years later the plaster is usually still stuck fast and what has failed is the surface, buried under textured paper, gloss and roller marks. Dust sheets go down and the surface is prepared and sealed with PVA where it is dusty, then those walls take two passes of finish coat, trowelled flat, one room at a time so you can carry on living in the rest of the house, with a mist coat over the new work before you paint. If a wall answers dead when we knock it, we will tell you to leave it alone rather than sell you a strip out. Where one has let go it comes off to the block for a backing coat first, browning or hardwall where the block pulls, bonding on a dense painted face.

A fifth of the homes here are bungalows, so their ceilings sit straight under a cold loft rather than under a heated bedroom. That is where sagging board, stained joints and cracks along the plasterboard edges show first, and it is why a ceiling here often needs the loft looked at before the trowel comes out. Most of the time overboarding and skimming beats pulling the old ceiling down, and lightly patterned artex can be sealed and skimmed flat, though anything from before the mid-1980s gets tested before it is scraped or sanded.

Roughly a fifth of the housing predates 1919, which means solid walls, lime plaster and often a lath ceiling. Those walls get rid of water through their own face, so a cement backing coat or a gypsum skim over one traps it and the finish blows again within a couple of winters. We keep the whole build-up breathable, patch in lime where lime is what is there. Later houses, extensions and loft rooms are plasterboard instead: on dot and dab or screwed to a stud, then tape and joint or a skim, with repairs skimmed wide enough that low winter light never picks the patch out.

Render on the weather side. Out here the wind and rain come off the open ground from the southwest, so one side of the house takes far more water than the rest and that is the side where a rigid sand and cement render crazes, drums and lets water sit behind it. Where it has gone, the honest choice is a like-for-like patch or a strip back to the masonry and a proper system: a scratch coat, a mesh reinforced basecoat, a primer and a silicone thin coat topcoat. Pebbledash comes off harder than anyone expects, so it is its own line on the quote, and a bell cast bead at the base throws water clear of the wall below.

No rate per square metre, because two rooms the same size can be a day apart. A sound wall that only wants a skim is a different job from one where the backing coat has blown. A room with coving, deep reveals and a chimney breast has far more corners to bead than a plain box. Round here that is usually a bungalow with everything on one level and room on the drive to stand a mixer, or a detached house set back behind a hedge where the van parks on the verge. Outside, a tower or a scaffold is a priced line.

About nine miles from us, covering Thorney Hill, Bransgore, Burley and the BH23 addresses on that side of the forest, with the National Park Authority for planning and New Forest District Council for building control. 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.