Plastering and rendering in Walhampton and Portmore

Lath ceilings in the cottages. Along the lanes at Portmore, Pilley and Mount Pleasant you meet ceilings that are lime plaster pushed through riven lath, and the question is never the crack you can see. It is whether the keys curled over the tops of the laths have snapped off. We put a head into the loft or the room above and look at them from behind. Where they have gone the ceiling comes down and goes back on board or on lime. Where they are holding, scrim, a patch and a skim is honest work and far cheaper.

Solid walls, and why they want lime. Better than a quarter of the homes here went up before the First World War, so those are solid wall with no cavity behind them. A wall like that takes a little rain in outside and dries back out again, and everything you put on it has to stay breathable. Where the plaster has parted from the brick, the loose work comes off back to a clean background and a lime backing coat goes on before any finish. There is real water in a floated wall and it has to leave through the room, so this is the job that takes a room out of use rather than a skim. A hard gypsum skim over a wall still carrying water is the commonest reason we get called back to somebody else's work, and if a wall drums under a knuckle we say so rather than take the easier money.

Three in ten homes in this parish are flats or maisonettes. Inside your own rooms the plastering is yours to instruct, but the outside of the building, render included, usually belongs to the freeholder and is managed out of the service charge, so it is worth knowing which of the two you are ringing about before anyone gets quotes. In the post-war houses and the flats the walls are board on stud in the partitions, dabs on the outside walls of the newer ones, taped joints and a fair amount of swirled artex overhead. Where the background holds we prepare it, seal it with thinned PVA or a bonding primer depending on what is already there, then run two passes of finish coat off the trowel.

Brick stables, cart sheds and garden rooms round here are steadily becoming living space. Board on dabs or on a stud, moisture resistant board behind a shower, insulated board where a cold wall is coming inside, then tape and joint or a full skim over the lot, with angle bead on every external corner and stop bead at each reveal.

The coast is under three miles from here and the exposed elevation faces south west, so salt-laden air keeps a seaward wall damp between showers and rusts anything ferrous inside the render, and a rigid sand and cement render on a wall that moves will hairline crack. Outside the backing is a render coat rather than plaster: a scratch coat or basecoat with mesh bedded through it, a primer, then a silicone thin coat, a monocouche or a K render topcoat, with a bell cast bead at the bottom so water drips clear of the wall instead of running down into it.

No rate per square metre. Every wall and ceiling is sounded with a knuckle first, because the split between what is skimmed and what comes off back to the brick moves the price further than the size of the room does. A Georgian house on the Lymington side with nowhere to park, a cottage at Portmore where the room cannot be emptied, and a first floor flat with a shared stair that will not take full sheets of board are three different jobs. Anything above a porch wants a scaffold on its own line, because work at height rules decide the platform rather than the budget.

We cover Walhampton, Portmore and the lanes round Boldre and Pilley, across to Lymington, Sway and Brockenhurst on SO41, and the New Forest National Park Authority is the planning authority for this address. 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 site visit and the written itemised quote are both free.