Rendering in Hangersley

Tapping the wall comes first. Every Hangersley price starts with sounding the elevation. Sound render answers dead, blown render drums, and the drumming runs further than the crack that made you ring. The chalk marks decide whether this is a repair or a whole elevation.

Hacking off. Where the render on a Hangersley house has parted from the background it comes off to brick or block, the wall is cleaned down, friable areas are stabilised and the background is left to dry. On soft old brickwork it comes off by hand rather than with a breaker.

Silicone thin coat. A polymer basecoat with a full mesh, a primer, then a through-coloured silicone topcoat scraped to a texture. It flexes with a block wall, sheds water and leaves no paint film to fail.

Monocouche. One through-coloured material in two passes, scraped back the next day. Even and crisp on a sound background, and a poor choice on a wall that has been patched repeatedly.

Lime on old solid walls. Where a building is period and pre-1919 the wall is solid and dries through its own face, so it wants a breathable lime render instead of a modern system that leaves moisture trapped behind it.

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 on your own wall before an elevation is committed.

Beads, bellcast and stop ends. A bellcast stops the render clear of wet ground, stop beads finish it at a soffit or a corner, and angle beads keep the reveals straight. On a low elevation within reach of stock we use a heavier duty bead and a tougher basecoat.

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 Hangersley trees the wall stays damp and greens quickly, so it is treated and cleaned at low pressure rather than blasted.

Keeping the site secure. Fencing round the working area, materials and the mixer inside it overnight, sand and cement covered, the scaffold closed off at the bottom, and fresh render at low level hoarded until it has cured.

Render over external wall insulation. With EWI the render becomes 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.

We never put a square metre rate on render. Measuring takes minutes; the state of the wall is what costs.

Scaffold on the slope. A detached house set well back from the lane, a bungalow on a gravel drive and a two storey gable close to the verge all need different platforms, and on Hangersley's sloping plots the scaffold is levelled on the low side. It stands until the last coat is cured, and the work at height rules set it apart as a separate line on the quote.

The old surface. Where the existing render on a Hangersley wall has come away from the brick, or a pebbledash finish has let go, it all has to be hacked back before anything new goes on. We knock along each wall before quoting and mark the dead areas.

Choosing the render. Silicone thin coat on insulation boards, a coloured monocouche, and a classic sand and cement scratch coat each cost and weather differently. The older Hangersley cottages have solid walls that need to dry out through their surface, which often points to a lime render instead.

Planning. In the National Park a change of finish may need an application, which affects the programme more than the price.

Before you decide, ask other renderers how many coats they put on, whether the old render comes off, whether beads, bellcast and stop ends are priced, whether the scaffold is in, and how they will deal with sills and pipework.

Ponies, cattle and donkeys graze the open forest here under rights that are a great deal older than any of the houses, and a good many plots at Hangersley have no fence between the garden and the verge. For most trades that is a curiosity.

On a Hangersley render job it is a practical problem, because rendering means a scaffold, a mixer, water, open bags of sand and cement, and a wall that stays soft for hours after it has been worked. Animals lean on scaffolding, taste anything left in a bucket, and a pony that rubs along a freshly scraped elevation leaves a mark you cannot polish out.

So the answer is to plan for it, not react to it. The working area gets fenced, materials go inside it at the end of each day, sand and cement are covered, the scaffold is closed off at the bottom so nothing wanders under it, and fresh render at low level is hoarded until it has gone off. It has to be set up on the first morning, not improvised on the second. When you compare quotes here, ask what the protection is and whether it is included.

We render across Hangersley, Poulner, Ringwood, Burley and Ashley Heath, broadly BH24, about nine and a half miles from our base at Boscombe. For planning it is the Park Authority, and building control sits with New Forest District Council.

Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. It belongs to Thomas Hannen, who checks the wall himself and puts the price together. A customer verified by Checkatrade gave us 10 out of 10. Neither the visit nor the itemised written quote costs you anything. Before you book a visit in Hangersley, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Hangersley 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.