Rendering in Wareham

Tapping the elevation comes first. Every Wareham 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 on a Wareham house 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 in Wareham 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 Wareham 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, never 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.

Measuring the wall takes minutes. What is on it, and what it is built from, is what the survey is for.

Platforms. A terrace front on the pavement needs a licensed scaffold, a bungalow gable on a Wareham estate takes a tower, and a two storey back addition over a tiny yard may need both. Whichever it is stays up through every coat and the drying time between, so it is priced on its own line under the work at height rules.

Coming off. Tapping finds the hollow patches. Where old sand and cement or pebbledash has let go of the brick, it all has to be hacked back to sound wall and bagged, and nobody can judge how far from the road.

Solid or cavity, and which way it faces. Older walls in Wareham town centre are solid and need to breathe, so lime or a breathable system suits them, while hard cement or a plastic finish traps damp inside. The later cavity-walled houses take a silicone thin coat, monocouche or traditional sand and cement. South west faces take the driven rain, so the bellcast over the damp course and the stop ends at openings need extra care.

Ask others which system and how many coats, whether the old render comes off or gets overlaid, and whether beads, bellcast and scaffold are in the price.

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 a Wareham render job at the base and in the choice of system. 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 render walls in Wareham town, Stoborough, Sandford, Northport and Ridge, broadly BH20, under Dorset Council. Wareham is 12.5 miles from our Boscombe base. The work is done by Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, with company number 15471719 on the public register. Before you book a visit in Wareham, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Thomas Hannen owns the firm and comes out to tap the wall and price it himself. We have a verified 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade from a customer. There is no fee for the site visit, and the itemised quote in writing is free as well.

Most repairs in Wareham 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.