Rendering in Lytchett Matravers

Tapping the elevation comes first. Every Lytchett Matravers quote starts with a knuckle over the whole surface. Sound render answers dead. Blown render drums, and the drumming carries well past the crack you can see. We chalk the hollow areas, and the chalk decides whether you are having a repair or an elevation.

Hacking off. Where sand and cement on a Lytchett Matravers house has parted from the background we hack off to the brick or block, prepare and clean down the wall, stabilise anything friable, and put a new basecoat on with mesh through it at the openings. Blown render cannot be stuck back and it cannot be sealed over.

Silicone thin coat. A polymer basecoat, a full mesh, a primer and a through-coloured silicone topcoat scraped to a texture. It moves better than sand and cement and sheds water off a block wall that expands and contracts. On the 1970s and early 1980s houses in Lytchett Matravers that is usually the right answer.

Monocouche. One through-coloured material applied in two passes and scraped back the next day. There is no paint on it, so a scratch does not show a different colour underneath. It wants a good background and it is unforgiving of a wall patched a dozen times.

Traditional sand and cement. A scratch coat and a float coat, ruled off and painted. Still the right specification in plenty of places, and what most of the original panels here are.

Pebbledash and Tyrolean. Dashing throws aggregate into a wet coat, Tyrolean is flicked on from a machine. Both are repairable, and both are texture matched from a sample panel.

Render over external wall insulation. On an EWI job the render is not decoration, it is the weather face of the system. It goes on a render carrier board or straight onto the insulation, with a full mesh basecoat and a thin coat over it, and every bead, sill and soil pipe has to be reset to the new thickness. That is the thermal upgrade people look at while the scaffold is already up.

Solid walls that have to breathe. A period wall in Lytchett Matravers, pre-1919 and with no cavity, dries through its own face. Put a plastic-rich modern system on one and the moisture is trapped and comes out inside instead. Those walls want a breathable lime render, softer than what it covers.

Beads, bellcast and stop ends. A bellcast at the bottom of a panel throws water clear of the wall below. Stop beads give a clean edge at a corner or a soffit, angle beads keep a reveal straight. Where a panel was stopped on nothing at all, that is usually where it failed.

Cracking, delamination and algae. Map crazing is a surface problem. Green growth on a shaded elevation is treated rather than blasted, because a pressure washer takes the face off a thin coat.

The price follows what is already stuck to the wall, not how big the wall is. Hollow or sound. Render that is still bonded can be patched and given a new coat. Where the sand and cement has let go of the brick, or old pebbledash has come away in sheets, it all has to come off before anything new goes on. That hacking off is invisible from the road, so Thomas taps every elevation before he quotes.

Which render. A through-coloured monocouche, a thin silicone coat on a basecoat and mesh, and a traditional sand and cement finish all cost different amounts and behave differently. On the solid walls of the older cottages, a hard cement render traps moisture, so a breathable lime or silicone system is the better match.

The details. A bellcast bead to throw water clear at the base, stop ends, angle beads at corners and new sills cost extra, but they keep water out of the line where render meets brick.

Scaffold time. Each coat needs curing time, so the platform stands for the whole system. The work at height rules are the reason access is a separate line.

Ask of a competing quote which system it uses and how many coats, whether the old render is being removed or covered over, and whether scaffold is included.

A lot of this village went up in one long run from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Builders working a site in those years used the same detail on every plot, so a whole road can share one rendered upper storey, one gable panel and one way of stopping the render at the bottom of it. When that detail is a weak one it does not fail on one house. It fails on the road.

The detail that catches people out is the base of the panel. On a lot of the Lytchett Matravers stock the render was taken down and finished on the brickwork below with no bellcast bead to throw water off. Rain wicks into that joint, freezes and lifts the bottom courses away from the block. From the ground you see a faint stain, but tapped it sounds hollow for a metre up. So start at the bottom edge rather than the crack you noticed.

Thomas Hannen owns the firm and prices every rendering job himself after tapping the walls. We are based in Boscombe, about eleven miles off, and cover Lytchett Matravers, Lytchett Minster, Upton, Organford and Post Green, broadly BH16, where Dorset Council is the authority.

Our registered company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. On Checkatrade a verified customer rated the job 10 out of 10. The site visit is free and so is the written quote, broken into lines. Before you book a visit in Lytchett Matravers, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Lytchett Matravers 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.