Rendering in Burley

Tapping the elevation. Nothing is priced before it is sounded. Sound render answers dead, blown render drums, and the hollow area is nearly always larger than the crack that made you ring. What we chalk is what goes on the quote.

Sample panels. A patch of each candidate finish, in the actual colour and the actual texture, on your own wall, looked at in daylight and in the shade the trees give. Colour charts lie in a way sample panels cannot, and here the panel is also what a planning conversation can be had around.

Hacking off. Render that has parted from the background comes off to brick, block or stone, and on soft old brickwork that is hand work rather than a breaker. The wall is cleaned down, friable areas stabilised and the background left to dry.

Silicone thin coat. Polymer basecoat, full mesh, primer, then a through-coloured silicone topcoat scraped to a texture. It flexes with a block wall, sheds water and needs no repainting, and the quieter colours are as available as the bright ones.

Monocouche. One through-coloured material in two passes, scraped back the next day. A lovely even face on a sound background, and unforgiving of a wall that has been patched many times.

Lime render on old walls. Where a building is period and pre-1919 the wall is likely to be solid and to dry through its own face, so it wants a breathable lime render rather than a modern system that leaves moisture trapped behind it. It is also usually what suits the village.

Sand and cement, pebbledash and Tyrolean. Traditional scratch and float render, dashed aggregate and machine-flicked Tyrolean are all repairable, and the texture is matched from a sample panel rather than guessed at.

Beads, bellcast and stop ends. A bellcast at the foot throws water off instead of letting it run onto the plinth, stop beads finish the render at a soffit or a corner, and angle beads keep the reveals straight.

Cracking, delamination and algae. Map crazing is a surface fault, a crack from an opening is movement, and frost turns either into a blown panel. Under trees a wall stays damp for longer and greens faster, so it is treated and cleaned at low pressure rather than blasted with a lance.

Render over external wall insulation. With EWI the render is the weather face of the system, over a render carrier board or the boards themselves, with a mesh basecoat and a thin coat over it, and beads, sills and pipes reset to the new thickness. In a conservation area the change of thickness at the reveals is itself an appearance question.

No rate per square metre, because the square metres are the easy part; what is already on the wall decides the price.

Getting to it. A cottage on the village street, a bungalow behind a hedge and a two storey elevation with trees close to the wall are three different platforms. A bungalow gable comes off a tower, a three storey elevation wants a scaffold, and the platform has to stand for the whole system rather than a day. The work at height rules are why it is a priced line rather than something folded into a rate.

What is already on the wall. Rendering over sound brick is one job. Hacking off blown sand and cement, or a pebbledash that has parted from the background, is another, and it is the part nobody can see from the road. We tap the whole elevation before quoting, because the hollow areas set the hours.

The system, and what the wall behind it needs. Silicone thin coat over insulation, monocouche through-coloured, or traditional sand and cement all price differently and behave differently. On a solid wall that has to breathe, a plastic-rich modern system traps moisture and moves the problem inside, so the right system is a wall decision rather than a colour decision.

Comparing quotes? Ask which system is being quoted and how many coats, whether the old render is being hacked off or overlaid, whether beads, bellcast and stop ends are included, whether the scaffold is in the price, and what happens to the existing sills and pipework. Two quotes for the same job are usually two different jobs.

With an old painted render, colour was reversible. If a shade looked wrong on the wall or somebody at the council did not care for it, you painted over it. Modern render does not work like that. In a silicone thin coat or a monocouche the colour is in the material, which is why there is nothing to repaint and why a chip does not show white underneath. It also means the colour is fixed the day the material is ordered.

In a conservation area that turns the colour into the first decision rather than the last. What is being protected is the character and appearance of the village, and a render that reads as bright or hard against soft, weathered neighbours is precisely the thing an officer will comment on. So we put sample panels on the wall itself and look at them in daylight, in the shade the trees throw and after rain, because render dries lighter than it goes on and a colour that looks gentle on a chart can look stark across a whole elevation. Settle that first, then choose the system to suit it.

We cover Burley, Bransgore, Ringwood, Hangersley and Sopley, broadly BH24, under the New Forest National Park Authority. You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, the trading name of 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 visit and the written quote are both free.