Plastering in Wool
Skimming, ceilings, patch repairs and external render across Wool, Bovington and the BH20 villages. We find what wet it before we price the repair.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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If a patch of wall in a Wool house has gone soft or hollow, the first job is finding where the water came from, not replastering it. We trace it, let the wall dry, then hack out the blown area, put a backing coat on and skim it flush with what is around it so the repair does not show.
Houses in Wool usually need plastering for a blown patch, a cracked ceiling or a change of owner. A wall that has blown in one patch, usually behind a kitchen unit, under a window or on the wall shared with next door. A ceiling that has cracked along the board joints or gone soft after a bath overflowed upstairs. Or a whole house that has just changed hands and wants skimming flat before the decorator starts.
We come out, sound every wall and ceiling in the rooms concerned, not just the one you rang about, find out what wet it in the first place, and give you a written price with the jobs on separate lines. If a skim will do the job we will tell you, and we will not quote a strip out.
The work
The difference between a repair and a scar
Skimming and making good suits most walls. The bulk of the housing in Wool went up between the war and the early eighties, most of it through the seventies, and it is thin gypsum plaster on brick or on the lightweight block that came in around then.
That plaster is usually still sound, so the job is a skim, not a strip: covers down, floors under dust sheets, a clean, a coat of PVA where the background is dusty, then two passes of finish coat off the trowel. One room is a day. A whole three bedroom house before decorating is most of a week.
Patch repairs after other trades. A lot of plastering in Wool is making good after somebody else: chased walls after a rewire, holes where a boiler or a radiator moved, the strip of bare block behind a kitchen that came out, a doorway blocked up. Cutting the patch back square, bonding it out to the right depth and feathering the finish in so you cannot find it under paint takes longer than people expect, and it is the difference between a repair and a scar.
Ceilings in Wool are plasterboard nailed to the joists with scrim tape over the joints, which is why the crack you can see runs straight across the room, and why the nails show as a row of small dimples. Both come right with a skim. A ceiling that has been soaked from above is different: it gets taken down, the boards go in the van, and we will not put a finish on until the joists are dry. Artex from the seventies skims over well once cleaned and stabilised, and we never sand or scrape a textured coating, because anything that old can contain asbestos.
Dry lining goes on dabs where the blockwork is flat and dry, stud where it is not, tape and joint or a full skim over the board, with angle bead on every external corner and stop bead where the plaster stops at a reveal. In a loft conversion the sloping ceilings and the little vertical walls at the eaves are where boards want cutting properly rather than filling, and it shows in the light from a Velux. Half of Wool is terraces and semis, so a good deal of this happens on a wall that belongs to two houses, and we come off one of those in sections rather than swinging at it.
Down near the river the fabric is older: solid walls with no cavity, lath ceilings, and lime plaster that has to stay breathable, so those get a haired lime backing coat rather than gypsum hardwall. Outside, the dry dash and pebbledash on the estate housing cracks and goes hollow around the openings first, and with the exposed elevation facing south west and the coast five miles off that is the wall that gets the driven rain. We cut back to sound material, mesh reinforce the repair and match the topcoat, and on modern blockwork it is a primer, a mesh reinforced basecoat and a silicone thin coat, off a bell cast bead clear of the damp course.
How it runs
Plastering and skimming in a Wool home
Thomas comes out, taps the walls and ceilings, finds out what is behind them, and prices it himself. Hacking off, boarding and skimming follow on that quote.
The quote sets out protection, hacking off, boarding, the backing coat, beads, the finish and disposal. In the seventies houses that is usually lightweight block with a thin coat of plaster, and plasterboard ceilings. In the older cottages it can be solid brick or lime on lath, which is repaired in lime. Floors and furniture are covered, the room is left usable each evening, and the debris goes with us. If plaster comes away further than expected, we photograph it and price it before going on.
Plaster inside is your business, and patching render like for like is repair. Where the house is, and what it is, can change that. In the older core of the village, adding render to a bare brick or stone front, or stripping it off, may count as a change of appearance if a conservation area applies, which is worth checking with Dorset Council. On one of the listed buildings, listed building consent can cover internal plaster as well as the front wall. And re-rendering most of an elevation, not patching it, brings in Approved Document L and Dorset Council building control. For the outside walls, see rendering in Wool.
Cost
What decides the cost of plastering here
The square metres are easy to measure and tell you little about the price. What the wall is made of. A seventies wall of lightweight block with a thin coat usually just needs a skim, unless it has cracked along the block joints.
A party wall in an older terrace may need hacking off and a new backing coat. A solid brick wall near the river that has only ever had lime on it needs lime again, or it will hold damp.
Ceilings. An artexed or cracked ceiling is usually overboarded with plasterboard and skimmed. Taking the old one down is dustier and slower.
Damp. Plastering over damp without finding the cause wastes the plaster. A south west facing wall that takes driven rain may need the outside dealt with first.
Access. A terrace with the front door on the pavement, a semi with a side gate too narrow for a barrow, and a bungalow with a drive to park on all affect how long it takes to get materials in and waste out.
Beads and corners. Every external corner, window reveal and stop end adds time.
Ask any other plasterer what backing coat is going on and why, whether beads are included, and who clears the waste.
If it has just gone
A ceiling down or plaster off after a leak
A ceiling that has cracked and dropped, plaster off a wall after a leak, or render that has come away from a gable needs dealing with now. Keep everyone out from under a sagging ceiling and switch off the lights on that circuit if water is near them.
Ring 07435 839745 instead of using the form. If nobody answers, leave a message and a call comes back to you as soon as we can manage. Our first job is making it safe, taking down anything loose and boarding or propping the rest, and price the plastering once the cause of the leak is fixed. Our booked hours are Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
Worth knowing
Plastering in a house that is joined to another one
Half the homes in Wool are terraced or semi-detached, and the wall you share is the one that behaves differently from all the others.
In most of the housing in Wool it is a single leaf of masonry with plaster straight onto it, and that plaster is doing more than looking flat: the mass of the wall and the coat on it are part of what keeps next door's television out of your living room. Hacking it off is noisy for them as well as for you, and the vibration can crack the plaster on their side of it, so we tell the neighbours before we start.
It also changes what we recommend. Dry lining a party wall on dot and dab sounds like an upgrade and often makes airborne sound worse, because you have built a drum with an air gap in the middle of it. On a party wall the safe answer is usually to repair and skim what is there, and if sound is the real problem, to say so and price a proper independent lining rather than let you pay for a board that makes it worse.
The other thing about an attached house is where the water comes from. A soft patch on your side of a shared wall, or a stain that appears high up in a bedroom, often starts in the house next door, and it can travel a long way sideways before it shows.
We would rather spend the first half hour finding it than replaster over it, because a skim on a wall that is still being fed will blow again inside the year and you will have paid twice. If it does turn out to come from next door, you get photographs of what we found, so you have something to show rather than an argument on the doorstep.
Who you are dealing with
A plasterer for Wool, East Stoke and Winfrith
Our plastering covers Wool and the BH20 villages round it: Bovington, East Burton, East Stoke, Coombe Keynes and Winfrith Newburgh, and along the A352 into Wareham. Boscombe, where our base is, is 17.1 miles away, and Dorset Council deals with planning and building control.
Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd is registered in England and Wales as company number 15471719, and the register is public. Thomas Hannen, the owner, taps your walls and prices the plastering himself. Checkatrade has a verified customer’s 10 out of 10 for us. Neither the visit nor the quote is charged for. Before you book a visit in Wool, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Wool?
Most repairs in Wool 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.
| Question | In Wool |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Wool. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | Yes: Wool Conservation Area. It covers part of Wool, so check whether your street is inside it. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Wool. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Wool. |
Questions
Questions about plastering in Wool
Next door's leak wet our party wall. What now?
The wall has to dry before anything goes back on it, and the leak has to be stopped first. Over half of Wool is terraced or semi detached, 25.8% and 24.7%, so shared walls are the norm here and water crossing between properties is common. We can strip the blown plaster back to brick to help it dry out and return to rebuild the coat later. Who pays for what is between you and the neighbour.
Is our street inside the Wool conservation area?
Dorset Council holds the boundary map and it is worth checking, because the designation covers part of the village instead of all of it. Inside the boundary, the external appearance of a building is controlled, so a change of render material or finish needs an application while like for like repair does not. Fifty-six listed entries also sit within a kilometre of the village centre, and those carry tighter control that reaches the internal plaster as well.
What is typical in the 1970s houses in Wool?
Plasterboard on timber for the ceilings and a backing coat on block for the walls. 55.0% of Wool was built between 1945 and 1982 and the peak fell in the 1970s and early 1980s, so most houses here are that build. What turns up is joint cracking overhead, a textured coating applied later that has to come off or be covered, and blown plaster low down on external walls.
Should we use sand and cement or a modern render?
On the south west face here, a mesh reinforced silicone system. That is the exposed elevation, roughly eight kilometres in from the coast, and it takes repeated wetting right through winter. Sand and cement is rigid, so it cracks with movement and then holds water behind the crack, which is what pushes it off the wall. A flexible system on mesh moves and sheds. On sheltered elevations sand and cement is still fine.
How many days for a pair of ceilings and one wall?
A day to sheet up and get the old surface off, a day to board and set, then drying time before decoration, so most people are back in the room inside a week. Water damaged ceilings add to that, because the joists have to dry before new board goes up. In an occupied house we work one room at a time so the rest of the property stays usable throughout.
Nearby, and next door
Plastering near Wool
Nearby places we also cover for plastering, with straight-line distances from Wool, and the other trades we offer in Wool itself.
Plastering nearby
Our other trades in Wool
Plastering and rendering guides
Silicone, cement or lime: which render? Cracked render: which cracks matter Hollow-sounding wall: blown plaster or dot and dabEverything we do in Wareham Plastering, all areas Every area we cover
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Get a price for plastering in Wool
Tell us the address and what you have noticed. We will come out, sound the walls, and put an itemised price in writing. No charge, and no obligation.