Plastering in Upton

Re-skimming the sixties and seventies stock. Half the houses in Upton went up between the war and the early eighties, with the biggest single run of them around the turn of the seventies, and they were built the same way: a block inner leaf, a float coat ruled onto it, a gypsum finish on top.

That plaster is normally still bonded. What has failed is the surface, buried under woodchip, textured paper and paint rolled on until the wall lost its line. Dust sheets go down, the surface is prepared and PVA goes on where it is dusty, then two passes of finish coat trowelled flat, a room at a time, so you can stay in the house.

Shared walls and cold-loft ceilings. Terraces and semis together are better than four in ten homes in Upton, so a good share of the walls here belong to two houses. Hacking off a shared wall is felt on the other side, so we come off it in sections, and where a chimney breast has been taken out the making good has to tie new plaster into what is left without leaving a straight line down the middle of the room. External corners take an angle bead and reveals a stop bead, cut out and renewed where damp has rusted one. Another quarter of the village is bungalows, where the ceiling has a cold loft over it rather than a heated room, and that is where sagging board and cracks along the board edges show first. Overboarding and skimming usually beats pulling a ceiling down, and anything textured from before the mid-1980s is tested rather than scraped or sanded.

Getting on for three in ten homes in Upton are mid-eighties or later, and those walls are plasterboard on dabs of adhesive or screwed to a stud, joints taped, then a skim or a tape and joint finish. Repairs go back the same way: cut out to a sound edge or a stud, fit a new piece the same thickness, tape the joint and skim it wide enough that daylight across the wall never finds the edge. A hollow sound across a wall like that is the construction, not a defect.

Where wet plaster goes back on, the backing coat follows the background: bonding on a dense or painted face with no suction, browning or hardwall where the brick or block will pull water out of the mix. On the handful of older solid wall houses it is lime, so the wall keeps breathing. Outside, the garage flanks, gable ends and fully rendered houses carry sand and cement of the same age as the estates, which crazes and drums, and pebbledash of that age is often loose in patches. Pebbledash is slow to remove, so it gets its own line. What goes back is a like-for-like patch or a silicone thin coat or monocouche off a bell cast bead.

We do not price by the square metre, because what is behind the surface decides the job. A sound wall may only want a skim. One where the backing coat has blown comes back to the block and starts again.

Ceilings. Working overhead is slower. An old textured ceiling can be skimmed if it is sound, or overboarded with new plasterboard if it is cracked, and it needs testing before either.

Access. An estate semi where the van pulls up at the door, a bungalow on one of the closes with everything on one level, and a terrace with no side gate where every board comes in through the front door each take a different amount of carrying.

Making good. Around sockets, new windows and cables an electrician has chased in, the beads and patching are fiddly and add hours. A room with lots of openings costs more than a plain one of the same size.

Outside. A tower does for low work, and a gable wants a scaffold.

When you hold our quote next to another, ask whether it is a skim or a full replaster, whether beads and making good are included, and who takes the waste away.

Upton lies just beyond Poole from our base at 80a Wolverton Road, Boscombe, 8.5 miles away, and we cover Upton, Lytchett Minster, Lytchett Matravers and the BH16 addresses along the Poole road. Dorset Council handles planning and building control for Upton.

The business is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Thomas Hannen owns it and prices each plastering job himself. On Checkatrade a verified customer rated us 10 out of 10. There is no charge for the visit or the written, itemised quote. Before you book a visit in Upton, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Upton 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.