Booking Coving In Rawtenstall

Rawtenstall keeps Lee busy with coving and cornice, and the reason is in the building stock. Stone-built Victorian terraces on the valley sides with no cavity, thirsty backgrounds that need stabilising, plus later semi-detached stock around Newchurch Road and Cloughfold. 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 Rawtenstall 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 common call from Rawtenstall addresses is the artexed ceiling. Textured coating went onto an enormous number of ceilings around this valley in the seventies and eighties, and forty years on people want it gone. Where it is thin and firmly stuck, skimming straight over it gives a flat modern ceiling in a day. Where it has been laid on thick, or where the original lath and plaster above it has started to move, overboarding first is the sound answer even though it costs a little more.

The other regular is the mid-terrace reskim before selling or letting. Rawtenstall has an active rental market and a steady stream of houses changing hands, and a full reskim is one of the few jobs that genuinely lifts what a property is worth relative to what it costs. A week's work takes a tired two-bedroom terrace from tired to photograph-ready, and it is far cheaper than the kitchen most people consider first.

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 Rawtenstall is covered, including Cloughfold, Waterfoot, Crawshawbooth. 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.