Rendering in Southbourne

Tapping comes first. Nothing in Southbourne is priced from the pavement. We go over the elevation with a mallet and chalk the hollow areas: sound render rings, render that has parted from its background knocks dull. That tells you whether you are paying to hack off and patch a panel, or for a new system.

Pebbledash and roughcast. Plenty of the inter-war houses and bungalows between the Grove and the cliff top carry a dashed finish, some of it original and some added later over tired brick. A bald or blown patch is cut back to a sound edge, given a new scratch coat and a butter coat, and the dash thrown on while it is wet. Be ready for the honest caveat: new dash will not match a weathered wall for a few years. If that matters, the choice is a breathable masonry paint over the whole elevation, or a thin coat system over the repaired dash.

Edwardian solid walls. The older houses in Southbourne are pre-1919, built before cavity walls, and a solid wall dries out through its face. A hard sand and cement render on one keeps the moisture trapped, the damp shows inside, the brick face can spall and the coat blows in the first hard frost. The repair goes back in lime, and sometimes the right answer is to take a failing cement render off and leave the brick to breathe. If someone offers to render sound Edwardian brick to freshen it up, we would talk you out of it.

Silicone thin coat and monocouche. On the post-war houses and the blocks of flats a modern system usually makes sense: a mesh reinforced basecoat, a primer and a silicone topcoat floated or scraped to the texture you choose, or a through-coloured monocouche put on in one build and scraped back. The colour is in the material, so there is nothing to repaint. The polymer in both lets them flex with the wall. Acrylic topcoats are tougher again but breathe less, so they suit a cavity wall better than a solid one.

Blocks on the cliff top. The flats along Southbourne Overcliff Drive face straight out to sea and take rain driven in off the water, the exposure BS 8104 is used to judge. That elevation gets stainless or PVC beads, never galvanised, a bellcast that throws water clear of the brick below, and a topcoat that sheds water without sealing the wall.

Cracks and algae. A crack stepping down from a window head is a route for water, so it is cut out, meshed and made good before the frost opens it further. Where a coat has started to delaminate, it comes off to a firm edge and the background is brushed down and stabilised with a primer before anything new goes on. A green film or dark staining on a sound coat is a surface problem: a clean down, a treatment and a breathable coating cost far less than a new system.

External wall insulation. Where a Southbourne wall is coming back to brick anyway, EWI is worth pricing at the same time. Insulation board or a render carrier takes the same basecoat and topcoat, so the thermal gain costs one scaffold, not two.

One person to ring from the first visit to the last. The quote is itemised, not a figure on the back of a card: access and scaffold, protection, preparation of the existing wall, the system and number of coats, beads and stop ends, and making good on separate lines, so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.

On a Southbourne job nothing is left open or unusable overnight. The site is swept at the end of each day rather than the end of the job, and what comes out leaves with us. If something turns up once we start that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on.

Re-rendering to match what is already there is maintenance and needs no application. A change of colour, texture or system on a frontage inside the Southbourne Grove conservation area is different, and so is changing the finish on a block of flats, which has no permitted development rights: the council keeps the list and we check the address before quoting. Insulation behind render is building control work, to the Part L standard in Approved Document L.

Ring rather than use the form. A section that sounds hollow when you tap it, or a crack you can get a coin into, is letting water behind the render and the frost does the rest.

We make the loose area safe, sheet it if the weather is against us, and price the elevation once we can see how far the blown area actually goes. If loose render sits over a shop doorway on the Grove or the entrance path to a block, keep people clear of it and tell the shop owner or the managing agent as well. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For anything urgent, ring rather than use the form, and if we cannot pick up we ring you back as soon as we can.

Call now: 07435 839745

Southbourne Grove is the long shopping street of independent shops at the heart of the suburb, and BCP Council designated a stretch of it as a conservation area in 1993. There is no published appraisal for it, so there is no document you can read to find out which finish or colour the council will accept.

That changes the order you do things in. Like for like repair to render on a building inside it is maintenance. A new colour, a smoother texture or a switch to a modern system on the street side is a question for the planning team before the scaffold goes up, not after it comes down. We tell you at the visit whether the building sits inside the boundary.

The Grove changes the scaffold too. The upper floors sit right over the pavement, so the scaffold stands on the public highway and needs a council licence under section 169 of the Highways Act, with a protected walkway so people can pass underneath. We apply for it and keep the noisy hacking off away from the busiest part of the shopping day where we can. If you own a flat above a shop, the front wall usually belongs to the freeholder, so the instruction has to come from them.

Nearby places we also cover for rendering, with straight-line distances from Southbourne, and the other trades we offer in Southbourne itself.

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