Rendering in Boscombe

Tapping comes before quoting. Every Boscombe job starts with a mallet. Sound render rings, blown render gives a dull knock, and the hollow areas get chalked so you can see them from the ground. On a tall villa we look from a window or a ladder where it is safe, and price the rest once the scaffold goes up instead of guessing from the pavement.

The converted villas. Most homes in Boscombe are flats, and a lot of them sit in large Victorian houses that were split up long ago. Many are red brick with rendered bays, side elevations or gables, finished in a traditional sand and cement scratch coat and float. Where the damage is patchy we cut back to a firm edge, make good the background, give it a key and patch in to match. Where half the wall knocks hollow, patching is money spent twice. About half the housing here predates 1919, so we check whether the wall is solid before choosing anything. A solid wall has to breathe through its face, and on those the repair goes back in lime instead of a cement or polymer coat that leaves moisture trapped behind it.

Upper floors over the shops. Along Christchurch Road the render is usually on the floors above a shop, with signage, cables and extract ducts fixed through it. Loose render comes off with a breaker back to the brick, anything friable is brushed down and stabilised with a primer, then a mesh or scrim goes into the basecoat so the new coat bridges the old chases and patched openings.

The blocks nearer the sea. The purpose built flats towards the cliff top take salt on every south westerly. A rust line bleeding out of a corner is almost always a galvanised bead failing inside the coat. Those come out and go back in stainless or PVC, with a bellcast bead at the base so water drips clear. Re-rendering a whole elevation usually means a silicone thin coat or a through-coloured monocouche, scraped or floated to the texture you choose, with a sample board on the wall first because colour reads differently on a shaded face.

Green staining and cracks. A north facing Boscombe wall hemmed in by the next building never dries, so algae take hold. If the coat still rings solid, a clean down and a breathable coating put it right for far less than new render. Crazing is usually cosmetic. A crack stepping down from a window corner lets water in, and frost will delaminate the coat round it, so it gets cut out, meshed and made good.

Render over insulation. If a block elevation is coming back to brick anyway, external wall insulation is worth pricing at the same time. Insulation board or a render carrier takes the same basecoat and topcoat, so the thermal gain costs one scaffold, not two.

When we would talk you out of it. Painting over hollow render, or covering pebbledash or Tyrolean that has parted from the wall. Both look fine for a season and hold the water in.

One person to ring from the first visit to the last. The quote is itemised, not a figure on the back of a card: access and scaffold, protection, preparation of the existing wall, the system and number of coats, beads and stop ends, and making good on separate lines, so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.

On a Boscombe job nothing is left open or unusable overnight. The site is swept at the end of each day instead of the end of the job, and what comes out leaves with us. If something turns up once we start that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on.

Repairing render to match what is there is maintenance. Most homes in Boscombe are flats, and flats have no permitted development rights, so changing the finish on a block needs planning permission. Five conservation areas sit wholly or mostly inside Boscombe, and the council keeps the list; a change of finish on a house inside one needs planning too. Any listed building needs consent for a change. Adding insulation under render is building control work, and Approved Document L sets the Part L standard it has to meet.

Ring rather than use the form. A section that sounds hollow when you tap it, or a crack you can get a coin into, is letting water behind the render and the frost does the rest.

We make the loose area of a Boscombe wall safe, sheet it if the weather is against us, and price the elevation once we can see how far the blown area actually goes. Where render sits above a busy pavement, anything loose comes down on the first visit, and on a block we let the managing agent know what we found. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For anything urgent, ring rather than use the form, and if we cannot pick up we ring you back as soon as we can.

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Boscombe has five conservation areas of its own. Boscombe Spa takes in St John's Church and the Burlington. Boscombe Manor covers Shelley Manor and St Andrew's Church. Churchill Gardens is a Victorian square of houses with fretwork porches and tile hung, half timbered gables. Knole Road and Undercliff Road are small ones. Between them they hold most of the older fabric that makes this part of Bournemouth look the way it does.

That matters for render in one specific way. Patching or re-rendering what is already there, in the same finish, is maintenance. Rendering brick that was never rendered, or swapping smooth render for a scraped silicone or a dash, is a change of appearance. On a house inside a conservation area that is not permitted development (the rules for houses exclude it), and on a block of flats it needs planning wherever it is. So if you want a different finish, ask us for a quote that describes it precisely, and get the application in before you book the scaffold. On Churchill Gardens especially, the tile hanging and timbering on the gables are the point of the street, so we would repair round them rather than render over them.

Nearby places we also cover for rendering, with straight-line distances from Boscombe, and the other trades we offer in Boscombe itself.

Everything we do in Boscombe Rendering, all areas Every area we cover