Accrington Coving: Straight Walls, No Fuss

Accrington keeps Lee busy with coving and cornice, and the reason is in the building stock. Dense hard Accrington brick terraces with low porosity backgrounds, heavily altered and re-let over decades, with layered previous repairs and widespread artex. Work with that rather than against it and the result lasts. Ignore it, price the job on area alone, and you get the patchy, cracked finishes that give the trade a bad name around here.

Getting the sequencing right saves money. Coving goes on after plastering and before decorating. Fitting it before the walls are skimmed means the plasterer has to work up to an edge that is already fixed, and fitting it after decorating means making good paintwork you have just paid for. It is a small thing that is easy to get wrong when several trades are booked around each other.

Period profiles are the more interesting end of this work. A lot of the older housing around East Lancashire has original decorative cornice, and a good deal of it has been damaged over the years by a removed wall, a leak, or a previous repair that gave up trying to match. Where a section is missing, the profile can often be taken from a surviving run and reproduced so the repair follows the original round the room rather than announcing itself.

In Accrington that usually shows up in the preparation rather than the finish. The trowelling is the same trade wherever you are; what changes town to town is how much work the background needs before any of it goes on. Underquote that stage and the job either overruns or the finish suffers, which is why coving and cornice here gets looked at properly before a figure is given.

The bread-and-butter job here is the full reskim, and Accrington has more than its share of properties where it is genuinely the right call rather than an upsell. Long terraces that have been rented and re-let for decades accumulate layers: three generations of wallpaper, filled sockets, a boarded-up fireplace, a ceiling coated in artex, and a couple of previous patches that never quite blended. Once a room reaches that state, patching another bit of it is money badly spent. Doing every surface in one run gives you a room where the light travels across the walls without catching on anything.

Making good after other trades is the second regular. Accrington's older housing is being upgraded constantly, and rewires, new boilers, replacement windows and removed chimney breasts all leave surfaces that need bringing back flat. Coordinating the plastering to follow those trades closely keeps a room out of use once rather than three times, and it is worth mentioning at quote stage so the timing can be planned rather than guessed.

What it costs and how long it takes: Priced by the metre plus the profile chosen, since a deep decorative cornice is considerably more work to fit and joint than a plain cove. A single room is usually a day, sometimes less for a plain profile in a square room. Everything in and around Accrington is covered, including Baxenden, Clayton-le-Moors, Huncoat. Lee gives you a written figure before anything starts, and that is the figure you pay unless the job itself changes and you agree to it first.