Coving Across Ramsbottom And Bury

Ramsbottom keeps Lee busy with coving and cornice, and the reason is in the building stock. Stone cotton-era terraces and cottages stepping up from the Irwell, solid walled and thirsty, with a high proportion of renovation and extension work. 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 Ramsbottom 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.

What distinguishes Ramsbottom is how much of the work here is part of a wider renovation rather than a standalone job. Walls knocked through, kitchens moved, extensions added, period features exposed or reinstated, and every one of those leaving a surface that has to be brought back to a single flat plane before anything can be decorated. Coordinating with the other trades matters more on these jobs than on a straightforward room skim, and being clear at the start about when the plastering can start and how long the drying takes saves the whole programme slipping.

The junction between old and new is the recurring technical point on renovation work. Where an extension meets the original house, or where new blockwork meets old stone, the two backgrounds move differently and a crack will appear at the joint if it is not detailed for. Beading and reinforcing that junction properly costs very little at the time and saves a repair a year later, and it is the detail most often skipped by someone working to a tight day rate.

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 Ramsbottom is covered, including Edenfield, Holcombe, Holcombe Brook. 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.