Rendering in Lyndhurst

Silicone thin coat on a Lyndhurst wall starts with primer, a polymer basecoat with glass fibre mesh bedded into it, then a through-coloured silicone topcoat floated to a scraped texture. The pigment is in the topcoat, not on it, so it does not peel and it fades slowly and evenly. It flexes a little and sheds water well. Beads and stop ends at every opening, a bellcast at the base.

Monocouche. One thick through-coloured coat scraped back the following day. The colour range is narrower than silicone and the finish is more granular, which suits some elevations and not others. It needs a sound background and a settled week, and it will show a patched wall.

Sand and cement, pebbledash and Tyrolean. Scratch and float coats with a smooth face, a dry dash thrown on green, or a Tyrolean flicked on. These are painted rather than through-coloured, which is why so many older village walls carry a masonry paint that needs redoing every decade. Matching an existing dash is aggregate size and colour, so a sample panel goes up first.

Lime render. A solid Lyndhurst wall built before 1919 gets rid of rain by drying out through its own face, so it takes lime in two or three coats, hair gauged in the base, and limewash rather than a modern paint. Sealing one of those walls with a plastic rich coat puts the damp inside the house.

Tapping and hacking off. Blown render has parted from its background and sounds hollow. We tap the whole elevation and mark it, because the extent decides between cutting out panels and stripping the wall back to the background.

Cracking, delamination and staining. Fine crazing is shrinkage and cosmetic. An open crack is movement or a failed bead and wants opening up and reinforcing, not filling. Algae and black staining on a shaded wall lift with a soft wash, never pressure.

Render over external wall insulation. Board fixed to the wall as a render carrier, then mesh, basecoat and topcoat over it, with Approved Document L setting what a renovated wall is expected to reach. It thickens every reveal and changes the proportions of a frontage, so in the village centre it is a design question as much as a heating one.

Render cannot be priced honestly by the square metre until someone has tapped the wall and knows what it is built of.

Stripping first. Laying new render on sound brick in Lyndhurst is quick. Knocking off old sand and cement that has lost its grip, or roughcast and pebbledash that have parted from the wall behind, is heavy, dusty and slow, and the hollow patches we chalk up when tapping decide how long it takes.

Choosing the render. A Victorian solid wall in Lyndhurst needs to breathe, so lime is usually what goes back on; cement or a plastic-rich finish seals the wall and drives the damp indoors. On a post-war cavity wall, a silicone thin coat or a through-coloured monocouche will do, each at its own price. Adding insulation behind the render is a further system.

Shade. Walls under trees stay damp and turn green. A breathable finish that can dry, with the bellcast and sills detailed to throw water off, keeps that in check.

Platforms. A Victorian villa on the High Street, a flat in a shared building and a detached house among trees each want different scaffolding, and the work at height rules give it a line of its own.

Put these to any other renderer: what system and how many coats, will the old render come off or be covered, and are beads, sills and scaffold in the figure.

With a through-coloured system the pigment is in the material. That is the advantage, because it cannot flake off the way paint does and you are not back up a ladder every eight years. It is also the catch: if you dislike it, the only real fix is another topcoat over the whole elevation.

So the colour is worth more thought than the two minutes it usually gets in front of a card of swatches. A shade always reads lighter and brighter at the scale of a house than it does on a sample the size of a postcard, and it reads different again in flat winter light under tree cover than it did in the yard in June.

Before choosing a colour in Lyndhurst, first insist on a sample panel on your own wall, at least the size of a door, and look at it dry, in the morning and in the evening, before anything is ordered. We will always put one up. Second, think about what is around the house rather than only about the house. In the village centre the frontages are seen together and a colour that jumps out of the row is the sort of change the conservation area is there to consider. Bright white is the one to think twice about here, not because of planning but because deep shade and damp air green it over faster than anything else, and you will be washing it while your neighbours are not.

Lyndhurst is 14.9 miles from our base in Boscombe. Rendering jobs take us round the village, Emery Down, Bank, Minstead and the villages across the middle of the Forest, broadly SO43, all within the New Forest National Park Authority's planning area.

The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. It belongs to Thomas Hannen, and he taps your walls and prices the render himself. A verified customer gave the work 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. Both the visit and the itemised quote in writing are free. Before you book a visit in Lyndhurst, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Lyndhurst 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.