Plastering in Tolpuddle

Straighten the old wall, or follow it. This is the decision people are never offered and it changes how a cottage room looks. You can rule an old wall dead flat by dubbing out the hollows with a backing coat and floating it to a rule until a straight edge sits on it anywhere.

Or you can follow the wall, take out only what is ugly and leave the gentle movement in it, which is what most people actually want in a room with a beam across it. We ask before we start. It is your decision.

A cottage ceiling in Tolpuddle is lime plaster squeezed through riven lath, held up by the nibs that formed above it. When those break it bellies between the joists and drops fine dust. If most of the key is intact it can be consolidated and skimmed. If it is moving it comes down, and then it is plasterboard fixed to the joists, or new lath and lime if the fabric matters. We also get ceilings that were overboarded years ago straight over the old one, screwed into plaster instead of joists, which is why they now sag in lines. Those come off.

Much of the plastering in an old village is picking up after other trades: chases cut for cables and pipes, the scar where a chimney breast came out, a new opening that wants an angle bead on the corner and a stop bead at the reveal. On a solid wall those get filled with a compatible backing coat rather than modern filler, because a hard plug in a soft wall shows through the paint within a year as a straight bright line. On the newer houses it is browning or hardwall instead, or bonding on a dense face. Barn and outbuilding conversions go on dot and dab, or a stud where the blockwork is not flat, then tape and joint. Outside, cottages here were often rendered in sand and cement in the last sixty years, and that is what is now crazed and letting water sit against a wall that cannot dry. Taking it off and going back in lime is the right answer on an old wall. On modern block it is a render coat under a silicone thin coat instead. For the outside walls, see rendering in Tolpuddle.

Two rooms of the same size can be a day apart once the old surface is opened up. Skim or strip. A sound wall that only needs a skim is quick. Where the backing coat has blown, it has to come off and be replaced, and old lath and plaster ceilings are often better taken down and replaced with plasterboard.

Lime or gypsum. Solid old walls usually need lime to let them breathe. Lime goes on in thinner coats with drying time between, so it takes longer than gypsum.

Ceilings. Everything is worked overhead, and low beams or sloping ceilings slow it down further.

Access into the house. If the cottage opens straight onto the street, every bag and board comes through the front door. A converted outbuilding with low doorways may not take a full sheet of plasterboard, so it is cut down first.

Outside work. Render or a high gable needs a tower or a scaffold, and that is its own line.

Ask anyone else quoting whether it is a skim or a full replaster, whether lime is being used where it should be, and whether beads and making good are included.

We set out from Wolverton Road in Boscombe, roughly twenty miles away, to Tolpuddle, Burleston, Puddletown and the DT2 addresses along the Piddle valley. Dorset Council covers planning and building control for all of them.

Behind this page is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, number 15471719. The business is Thomas Hannen's, and he looks at the walls and ceilings and prices the job himself. A customer verified by Checkatrade scored the work 10 out of 10. The visit is free, and the quote comes in writing, itemised, at no cost. Before you book a visit in Tolpuddle, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Tolpuddle 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.