Rendering in Corfe Castle

Sounding the elevation comes first. Nothing in Corfe Castle gets priced until it has been tapped. Sound render answers dead and blown render drums, and the drumming almost always runs further than the crack that made you ring. We chalk the hollow areas and the chalk decides the scope.

Hacking off. Where a Corfe Castle render has parted from the background it is hacked off back to the stone or block, and on stone that is careful hand work rather than a breaker, because the face has to survive it. Then the wall is cleaned down, anything friable is stabilised, and it is left to dry.

Lime render on solid walls. A period pre-1919 wall in Corfe Castle is solid limestone with no cavity, and it wants a breathable lime render: a scratch coat keyed and left, a straightening coat, then a fine float finish, each firming up in its own time. Slower than anything modern, and the only thing that will not leave moisture trapped in the wall.

Silicone thin coat. On blockwork, a polymer basecoat with a full mesh embedded in it, a primer, then a through-coloured silicone topcoat scraped to a texture. It moves with the wall and there is nothing to repaint.

Monocouche. One through-coloured material in two passes, scraped back the next day. It gives a crisp, even face but wants a good background, so it is a poor choice on a much-patched wall.

Sand and cement, pebbledash and Tyrolean. Traditional render in a scratch and float, dashed aggregate thrown into a wet coat, or Tyrolean flicked from a machine. All three are repairable, and matched off a sample panel first.

Beads, bellcast and stop ends. The render is judged at its edges. A bellcast throws water clear at the foot of a wall, stop beads finish it at a soffit or a corner, angle beads keep the reveals straight, and a movement bead lets a long elevation move without splitting.

Cracking, delamination and staining. Map crazing is a surface fault. A crack from a window head is movement, and rendering over it hides it until the next winter opens it again. Frost turns a small crack into a blown panel. Algae on a shaded wall is treated and cleaned down, not blasted.

Render over external wall insulation. With EWI the render is the weather face of the system rather than a finish, going onto a render carrier board or the boards themselves with a mesh basecoat and a thin coat over it. Every bead, sill and pipe is reset to the new thickness. In this village it belongs on the newer houses, not on the stone.

We don't render at a rate per square metre. What is on the wall now, and what the wall is made of, decide the price.

Scaffolding. A Corfe Castle cottage on East Street has no room for a tower, a bungalow gable off the main road does, and a two storey back wall needs a full scaffold. It stays up until the last coat has cured, and the work at height rules make it a separate item.

Taking the old off. Hard cement render and pebbledash that have come loose from stone have to be hacked off with care, so the stone face is not pulled away with them. We sound every wall before quoting, since the loose areas set the hours.

Choosing the render. On solid Corfe Castle stone, lime is usually right because the wall must dry out through it. Monocouche, silicone thin coat over insulation, and plain sand and cement are quicker to apply but hold damp against stone and push it indoors. The south west walls take the heaviest rain, so the bellcast at the base and the stop ends round openings must throw water clear.

Ask any other firm what render they will use and in how many coats, whether the old is stripped or covered, whether beads, bellcast and stop ends are included, and who deals with the sills and pipework.

Corfe sits in the one real break in the Purbeck ridge, and the wet weather here arrives from the south west. A gap in a ridge does to wind what a doorway does to a draught: it speeds it up and it concentrates it.

So west and south west facing walls in Corfe Castle take far more driven rain than the same wall would a couple of miles either side, and that is the wall that fails first. BS 8104 is the code that puts a number on exactly that, and it is the reason a render specification is a weather decision rather than a colour decision.

In Corfe Castle it changes the detailing, not the material. On an exposed elevation the mesh runs the full wall rather than only at the openings, every window and door corner gets a diagonal reinforcing patch because that is where a crack starts, the sills need a throat and an end stop so water leaves the wall instead of running back under, and the render stops on a bellcast rather than dying onto the plinth. Get those right and an exposed wall lasts as long as a sheltered one.

Corfe Castle is about eleven and a half miles from our base in Boscombe. We render across the village and in Kingston, Church Knowle, Harmans Cross and Stoborough, broadly BH20, with Dorset Council as the authority. Thomas Hannen runs the business and comes out to price the rendering himself.

The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, and its number, 15471719, is on the public register. Checkatrade carries a verified customer's score of 10 out of 10. The visit and the written quote, with the lines set out, are free. Before you book a visit in Corfe Castle, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Corfe Castle 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.