Rendering at Holton Heath

Tapping the whole elevation comes first. The survey of a Holton Heath house is a light hammer over every square metre, including the parts you cannot see from the ground. Sound render rings hard. A hollow note means the coat has delaminated from the background and nothing put on top of it will hold it there. We mark the areas, photograph them and measure them, and that measurement is the decision.

The overlay. Where the existing coat on a Holton Heath house is stuck and reasonably flat, the wall is cleaned down, any loose patch cut out and made good, a stabilising primer applied as a key, and then a mesh reinforced polymer basecoat is worked over the whole elevation before a through-coloured silicone topcoat scraped to a fine texture. The mesh is the point: it ties the new coat across the old cracks so they do not print through within a year.

The strip out. Where more than roughly a third of a Holton Heath wall is hollow, we hack off to the blockwork, clean down the background, cut out loose mortar and any spalled face and let it dry. It is more work and more waste, and it is the cheaper answer over any sensible timescale once a coat has genuinely started to let go.

Beads and stop ends. Either way the edges are rebuilt: angle beads on every corner, stop beads at reveals and against frames, a bellcast at the base so water is thrown clear rather than tracking back underneath. On an overlay the render is now thicker, so the beads, the sills and the pipework all need setting out again, and that is the detail cheap overlays skip.

Monocouche, sand and cement and dash. Monocouche is a single thick through-coloured coat for new blockwork and extensions. Traditional two coat sand and cement, scratched and floated, still belongs on plinths, garages, chimneys and boundary walls, and takes paint, dry dash or a Tyrolean finish. Pebbledash with a sound backing can be stabilised, patched and re-dashed to match rather than stripped.

Cracking and staining. Fine crazing across a panel is shrinkage in the coat and is a good candidate for an overlay. A single crack out of a window corner is movement in the building and wants understanding before anything covers it. Green streaking is algae and only wants washing.

Render over external wall insulation. If you are going to disturb the elevation anyway, EWI board with a render carrier or a mesh basecoat is worth pricing alongside a plain overlay, and the thermal gain depends on the sill, eaves and base detailing rather than on the board thickness.

Measuring the wall is the easy bit. What is on it now is what sets the price. Scaffold. A detached house with plenty of room down the side, a semi with a garage tight to the fence, and a bungalow with a conservatory in the way all need a different set-up.

A Holton Heath bungalow gable can often be done from a tower, while a two storey wall needs a full scaffold that stays up for the whole job. Under the work at height rules, that is priced as its own item.

Old render. Coating over sound render or brick in Holton Heath is one price. Where sand and cement has blown, or pebbledash has come loose from the blockwork, it all has to be knocked off first, and you cannot tell from the pavement. Every wall is tapped before the quote is written.

Which render. Silicone thin coat over insulation boards, one-coat monocouche with the colour through it, and traditional sand and cement all cost different amounts and suit different walls. On the few older solid walls, a render that does not breathe traps damp and pushes it indoors.

Trims. A bellcast above the damp course, beads on every corner and window, stop ends at the sills, and taking off and refitting pipes and satellite brackets all take time.

Ask anyone else pricing it which render and how many coats, whether the old render is stripped or covered, whether bellcast, beads and stop ends are in, and whether the scaffold is included.

An overlay is genuinely attractive on eighties and nineties blockwork. There is no strip out, so no skip and no week of noise. The wall is not exposed to the weather halfway through. And a mesh reinforced basecoat over a sound existing coat gives you a finish that behaves like a new system, because the flexible part of it is the part that faces the weather.

What kills an overlay in Holton Heath is a hollow background. If the old coat has parted from the block in patches, then whatever you put on top is now bonded to something that is itself hanging on the wall. It will look right for a year or two, and then the loose area behind it will move and take the new work with it, in a bigger sheet than would have come off on its own. That is why the tapping matters more than anything else in the quote, and why we do it before we talk about colour.

The rule of thumb we work to is a third. Below that, cut out the failures, make good, and overlay the whole elevation with mesh in the basecoat. Above it, take the lot off. If someone quotes you an overlay without having gone round the wall with a hammer, ask them how much of it is hollow. If they cannot tell you, they have priced a guess, and you will find out which way it went in about three winters.

Holton Heath sits 10.7 miles from our Boscombe base. We render across the village, Sandford, Lytchett Minster, Wareham and Upton, and Dorset Council is the authority for planning and building control. The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Before you book a visit in Holton Heath, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Thomas Hannen, the owner, taps over your walls and prices the render himself. Our Checkatrade page carries a verified customer's rating of 10 out of 10. No fee is charged for the visit, and the itemised written quote is free too.

Most repairs in Holton 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.