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 the village, so a good share of our work is on a wall that belongs 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 here 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.

No rate per square metre: what is behind the surface decides it, a sound wall that only wants a skim against one where the backing coat has blown and comes off back to the block. Access here is usually a semi on an estate road where the van gets to the door, a bungalow off one of the closes with everything on one level, or a terrace with no side gate where the only way in is the front door. Outside, a tower does for low work and a gable wants a scaffold. Comparing quotes, ask whether it is a skim or a full replaster, whether beads and making good are in, and who takes the waste.

Under seven miles from us, covering Upton, Lytchett Minster, Lytchett Matravers and the BH16 addresses along the Poole road, with Dorset Council for planning and 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.