Coving Across Burnley And Burnley

Burnley keeps Lee busy with coving and cornice, and the reason is in the building stock. Dense solid-walled Victorian weaving terraces, heavily altered over a century, with layered previous repairs and widespread artex ceilings. 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 Burnley 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 single most requested job here is the full room skim, usually to get rid of textured ceilings and patchy, much-repaired walls in one go. It is a one to two day job for a typical Burnley terrace room including the ceiling, and it changes a room more than almost any other spend of the same money. The second most requested is making good after other trades, particularly after rewires, where chases and box cut-outs need bringing back flat so a decorator has something worth painting.

Water damage repairs are a steady third. In a long terrace the usual suspects are consistent: a slipped slate, a shared gutter that has blocked at the join, or a failed seal around a shower. The ceiling at the top of the stairs is the classic casualty. Lee will point at the likely cause before repairing it, because a ceiling replastered under a live leak is a ceiling you pay for twice, and being told that up front is worth more than a slightly cheaper quote.

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 Burnley is covered, including Brierfield, Worsthorne, Cliviger. 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.