Rendering in Wareham

Tapping the elevation. Every job starts with the survey. Sound render answers dead under a knuckle, blown render drums, and in a terrace the hollow area usually runs past the party wall line. What we chalk is what we price.

Hacking off and preparing. Render that has parted from the background comes off to brick, stone or block. The wall is cleaned down, raked and stabilised where the joints have gone soft, then left to dry before a new basecoat goes near it. Rendering onto a wet background is how a job fails in its first winter.

Lime render on the old town walls. Anything pre-1919 here is likely to be solid, with no cavity, and it needs a breathable finish. Lime goes on in coats, a scratch coat keyed and left, a straightening coat and a fine float, and it lets the wall push moisture back out rather than leaving it trapped.

Silicone thin coat. On modern blockwork, a polymer basecoat with a full mesh, a primer and a through-coloured silicone topcoat scraped to a texture. It flexes with the wall and there is no paint film to fail.

Monocouche. A single through-coloured material applied in two passes and scraped back the following day. Crisp and low maintenance, and it wants an even background to look its best.

Sand and cement, pebbledash and Tyrolean. The traditional scratch and float, dashed aggregate thrown into a wet coat, and machine flicked Tyrolean are all over the town on the twentieth century stock. All are repairable and matched from a sample panel.

Beads, bellcast and stop ends. A bellcast at the foot of a wall throws water off instead of onto the plinth. Stop beads finish the render at a soffit or a boundary, angle beads keep reveals straight, and on a long terrace a movement bead saves a crack later.

Cracking, delamination and algae. Map crazing is a surface fault, a crack from a bay or door head is movement, and frost turns either into a blown panel. Green growth on a shaded back wall is treated and cleaned down rather than blasted.

Render over external wall insulation. On an EWI job the render is the weather face of the system, applied over a render carrier board or the insulation itself with a mesh basecoat and a thin coat topcoat, with every bead, sill and pipe reset to the new thickness. It is a thermal upgrade for a block or cavity wall, not for the solid walls in the old town.

No rate per square metre, because the square metres are the easy part; what is already on the wall decides the price.

Getting to it. A terrace front straight onto the pavement, a bungalow gable on the newer estates and a two storey back addition over a small yard are three different platforms. A bungalow gable comes off a tower, a three storey elevation wants a scaffold, and the platform has to stand for the whole system rather than a day. The work at height rules are why it is a priced line rather than something folded into a rate.

What is already on the wall. Rendering over sound brick is one job. Hacking off blown sand and cement, or a pebbledash that has parted from the background, is another, and it is the part nobody can see from the road. We tap the whole elevation before quoting, because the hollow areas set the hours.

The system, and what the wall behind it needs. Silicone thin coat over insulation, monocouche through-coloured, or traditional sand and cement all price differently and behave differently. On a solid wall that has to breathe, a plastic-rich modern system traps moisture and moves the problem inside, so the right system is a wall decision rather than a colour decision.

Comparing quotes? Ask which system is being quoted and how many coats, whether the old render is being hacked off or overlaid, whether beads, bellcast and stop ends are included, whether the scaffold is in the price, and what happens to the existing sills and pipework. Two quotes for the same job are usually two different jobs.

Wareham sits on low ground between the Frome and the Piddle, and parts of the town are inside flood zones 2 and 3, which you can check yourself on the flood map. Even where a house has never taken water inside, ground saturated through a wet winter keeps the bottom of a wall wet for months, and splash off a hard path puts more back onto it every time it rains. That is a different loading from the driven rain hitting the top of the same wall.

It changes two things about a render job. First, the render must stop clear of the ground on a bellcast bead, above any damp proof course, rather than running down into the path where it bridges the course and wicks water up behind itself. Second, on a solid wall that gets wet from below a plastic-rich system is the wrong choice however good it looks, because the water coming up has to leave again through the face. Approved Document C is the reference for keeping moisture out of a wall in the first place. If a quote does not say where the render stops at the bottom, ask. In this town that line decides how long it lasts.

We cover Wareham town, Stoborough, Sandford, Northport and Ridge, broadly BH20, under Dorset Council. You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, the trading name of Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free.