Rendering in New Milton

Sounding the wall comes first. Every New Milton price starts with tapping the full elevation. Sound render answers dead and blown render drums, and on a terrace or a block the hollow area usually carries across more than one property, which needs saying before anybody signs anything.

Hacking off. Render that has parted from the background is hacked off to brick or block, the wall is cleaned down, anything friable is stabilised and the background is left to dry. Nothing is coated over a hollow area.

Silicone thin coat. Polymer basecoat, full mesh, primer, then a through-coloured silicone topcoat scraped to a texture. A lot of New Milton is 1980s blockwork, which moves a little with the weather, and a thin coat moves with it. There is no paint film to maintain afterwards.

Monocouche. One through-coloured material in two passes, scraped back the following day. Even and crisp on a good background, and popular on blocks of flats because there is nothing to repaint out of the service charge later.

Traditional sand and cement. Scratch coat, float coat, ruled off, then a breathable masonry paint. Much of the older render in New Milton is this, and where it is sound it is worth recoating rather than replacing.

Pebbledash and Tyrolean. Dashed aggregate thrown into a wet coat, or Tyrolean flicked on by machine. Both repair well and both are texture matched off a sample panel before an elevation is committed to.

Beads, bellcast and stop ends. On a shared New Milton elevation the stops matter more than usual, because a render has to finish on a bead, a corner or an opening and a party line is often the only honest place. A bellcast keeps the foot of the render clear of the ground, and angle beads keep every reveal straight.

Cracking, delamination and algae. Map crazing is a surface fault that can be bridged with mesh and recoated. A crack from a window head is movement. Frost turns either into a blown panel. Green growth on a shaded or seaward elevation is treated and cleaned down at low pressure.

Render over external wall insulation. With EWI the render is 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 every bead, sill and pipe reset to the new thickness. On a block of flats it is normally a decision for the freeholder rather than a single leaseholder.

Older solid walls. A handful of pre-1919 buildings sit in the town centre. Those are solid and dry through their own face, so they want a breathable lime render rather than a modern system that leaves moisture trapped.

Hollow patches you cannot see from the pavement. The post-war render and pebbledash in New Milton was mostly sand and cement, and after decades of south westerly rain parts of it let go of the brick behind. Tapping every elevation with a hammer handle is how Thomas maps it, and the hollow area, not the wall area, decides how many days go into hacking off and dubbing out.

Which system goes back on. A traditional sand and cement scratch coat and float coat, a through-coloured monocouche, or a silicone thin coat over a basecoat and mesh each price differently. The wall decides it: solid brick that needs to breathe should not be sealed in, while an eighties cavity wall with a sound background suits most of them.

Beads and fixings by the sea. Galvanised angle beads and stop ends rust through on a seaward elevation and bleed brown streaks down fresh render. Stainless or PVC beads cost a little more and stop that.

The platform. A New Milton bungalow gable is a tower job. A terraced front over a pavement or a block of flats wants scaffold, and it stands for every coat plus the drying time in between. The work at height rules are the reason access has its own line.

Things to ask any rival quote: is the old render coming off or being skimmed over, how many coats and of what, and are the bellcast, beads and stop ends priced in?

Around a quarter of the homes in New Milton are flats, most of them leasehold, and under a normal lease the external walls are retained by the freeholder and maintained through the service charge.

That means a New Milton leaseholder cannot instruct rendering on their own elevation even when it is plainly the wall outside their own window. What you can do is report it in writing to the managing agent, ask for an inspection, and ask that we are invited to quote.

There is a second thing worth knowing, and it explains why work on blocks moves slowly. Where a leaseholder's share of a set of works would come to more than a modest statutory figure, currently £250, the landlord has to consult the leaseholders formally before it starts, which is what Section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 requires. That consultation takes time and cannot be skipped, so a block elevation is a planned job, never a quick one. If you are watching render come off above a shared entrance, put it in writing early and get it into the agent's programme, because the paperwork rather than the scaffold sets the start date.

From our base in Boscombe to New Milton is eight miles. We render across the town and BH25, Barton on Sea, Ashley, Bashley and Hordle, where New Forest District Council is the authority. The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Before you book a visit in New Milton, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Thomas Hannen, who owns it, taps the walls and prices the render himself. Checkatrade carries a verified customer's score of 10 out of 10. The visit, and the written quote broken down line by line, cost you nothing.

Most repairs in New Milton 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.