Plastering and rendering in Wareham

Lath and lime in the old streets. The brick houses along North Street, West Street and South Street carry lime plaster on solid walls with lath ceilings overhead, and about one home in six in the town predates 1919. The crack you can see is rarely the problem. What matters is whether the plaster keys that curl over the backs of the laths have snapped off, and that is a job for a look from the loft or the floor above. Keys gone, the ceiling comes down and goes back on lime or on board. Keys holding, scrim and a skim will see you out.

Where old plaster has parted company with the brick, it comes off back to a clean background and a backing coat goes on first. On these walls that usually means lime rather than gypsum, because a solid wall has to keep breathing, and a hard modern finish over one still carrying water simply blows again. Where the wall is genuinely dry, browning or hardwall and a gypsum finish are honest and cheaper.

Skimming in the post-war and seventies housing. Half the town went up between the war and the early eighties, most of it around the turn of the seventies, and the estates off Sandford Road and Worgret Road are the other half of our work here: plasterboard on stud, taped joints, artexed ceilings and, in the newer ones, dabs on the outside walls. Where the background is sound we prepare and prime the surface, thinned PVA or a bonding primer depending what is already on it, and run two passes of finish coat off the trowel. A bedroom is a day.

Close to three in ten homes in Wareham are terraced, and the same three jobs come round: the scar where a chimney breast has been taken out, a party wall dry lined at some point and now hollow in patches, and hallway ceilings that crack because everything upstairs walks over them. Angle bead on every rebuilt corner and stop bead at each reveal, or the new work chips within a year. A fifth of the town is bungalows, which means wide ceilings with nothing but a cold loft above them, and they show every crack.

Outside there are gable ends, porches and the odd wholly rendered house. Older walls here carry sand and cement, often pebbledash; newer work is a thin coat silicone, a monocouche or a K render system. New render goes on as a scratch coat or basecoat with mesh bedded through it, then a primer and the topcoat, with a bell cast bead at the bottom so water drips clear of the wall rather than running down into it. The exposed elevation faces south west, and a hairline crack in render on that side is a door for water rather than a blemish.

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 town house in West Street with nowhere to park, a terrace near the quay where the van cannot get closer than the corner, and a seventies bungalow with a drive and a room you can empty 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 Wareham town, Northport and Stoborough, out to Sandford, Ridge, Wool and the Purbeck villages on BH20, and Dorset Council is the planning and building control 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.