Rendering in Ashley Heath

Sounding and mapping come first. The survey of an Ashley Heath house is a light hammer over every rendered area, panel by panel. Hollow render has already parted from the background. We mark it, photograph it and measure it, and on a part-rendered house that map is what decides whether a panel is repaired or replaced.

Sample panels and matching. Before anything, a sample of the proposed texture and colour goes on your Ashley Heath wall and stays there until you have seen it in morning and afternoon light. Texture first: a coarse float finish, a fine scraped one and a dry dash read completely differently at twenty feet, and getting that wrong is more obvious than being a shade out on the colour.

Patching and making good. Where the surrounding coat is stuck, we cut the failed area back to a straight edge, stabilise the backing, fill in with a matching mix and blend the texture out. Done on a panel bounded by a bead or a brick course it disappears. Done in the middle of an open gable it always shows a little, and we will say so before you spend the money.

Hacking off and rebuilding a panel. Hack off to the background, clean down, cut out anything loose or spalled, then a primer or a slurry key on dense block, then bead: angle beads on the corners, stop beads where render meets brick or a frame, and a bellcast at the base. Getting the new coat to finish flush with the old at those junctions is most of the skill.

The systems. Silicone thin coat, a mesh reinforced polymer basecoat under a flexible through-coloured topcoat, is our preferred answer on the cavity blockwork in Ashley Heath. Monocouche gives one thick through-coloured coat and suits new work and extensions. Traditional sand and cement, scratched and floated, still belongs on plinths, garages and boundary walls, and takes paint, dry dash or Tyrolean.

Pebbledash, cracking and staining. A dashed panel with a sound backing can be stabilised, patched and re-dashed to match the existing aggregate. Fine crazing is shrinkage. A crack out of a window corner is movement. Green streaking under a gutter is algae and wants washing rather than rendering.

Render over external wall insulation. On a part-rendered house EWI is more complicated than on a plain one, because the board builds the wall out and every junction with brick, tile hanging, a sill or a soffit has to be re-detailed with a render carrier or a mesh basecoat. It can be done well. It cannot be done cheaply.

Render in Ashley Heath has no square metre rate. The state of what is already on the wall sets the work.

Knocking off. Sound brick on an Ashley Heath house can take new render as it is. Blown sand and cement, or pebbledash that has come away from the brick, has to be hacked back first. It is slow, dusty and invisible from the drive, so we tap every elevation.

The south west gable. That face takes the driven rain, and it is where a crack lets water behind the coat. A flexible, water repellent top coat is worth the extra on that side.

System choice. Silicone thin coat, used on its own or over insulation, monocouche coloured right through, and traditional sand and cement all go on in different ways and cost different amounts. Ashley Heath houses are mostly cavity walls, so breathing matters less than on an old solid wall, but beads, bellcast and movement joints still need to be right.

The platform. A single storey gable in Ashley Heath is done off a tower. A chalet dormer or a two storey wall needs scaffold, and it stays up for the full system, not one day. The work at height rules are why you will see it itemised.

Line the quotes up on these points: the system and the number of coats, whether old render comes off or is covered over, whether beads and stop ends are in, how sills and pipework are dealt with, and whether the scaffold is in the total.

When only part of a house is rendered, every repair is a judgement about where to stop. The honest answers run from a patch to a whole elevation, and the right one depends on the wall, not on what is easiest to sell.

Stop at the failure if the render around it is genuinely sound and the patch is bounded by something: a bead, a brick course, a corner, the underside of a sill. Your eye reads edges, so a repair that finishes at a line looks deliberate and a repair that fades out in the middle of a panel looks like a repair. Do the whole panel if more than about a third of it is hollow, because you will be back otherwise, and a panel is a natural unit that can be finished corner to corner in one go. Do the whole elevation when the coat is the same age everywhere and has started to fail in more than one place, since the rest is not far behind and the scaffold is already up.

What we would push back on is the middle option nobody needs: rendering over sound brickwork to make a patch easier to hide. That adds a maintenance liability to a wall that did not have one. If a firm quotes you for covering more of the house than is failing, ask them to show you the hollow areas they found and where they are. On a part-rendered house that is a fair question and it has a straight answer.

From our base in Boscombe to Ashley Heath is 7.1 miles, and we render houses and bungalows through BH24, from Ashley and St Ives to St Leonards and Ringwood. Building control for a full elevation goes to Dorset Council.

The company doing the work is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 15471719, open to anyone on Companies House. Thomas Hannen owns it, taps your walls himself and prices them. A verified customer left a 10 out of 10 for us on Checkatrade. There is no fee for the visit or for the written, itemised quote. Before you book a visit in Ashley Heath, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Ashley Heath 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.