Your Local Great Harwood Specialist For Rendering

Great Harwood keeps Lee busy with rendering and exterior plastering, and the reason is in the building stock. Older solid-walled stone terraces and cottages with inconsistent backgrounds, walls carrying a slight roll, and a good deal of original coving and cornice. 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.

Detailing is what makes render last, far more than the product on the bag. Bellcast beads at the base so water throws clear of the wall instead of tracking back behind it. Proper stop beads at every opening. Movement joints where the background changes from stone to block. And a scratch coat left to cure properly before the top coat goes anywhere near it. Every failed render you can point at on a Lancashire main road failed at one of those details, not in the mix.

So the system gets specified to the property rather than the property getting fitted to one product. A solid stone wall that has always breathed is a poor candidate for a dense cement render, because trapping moisture in a wall that needs to let it out causes damage that shows up inside the house. A modern block build on an exposed corner is a strong candidate for a through-coloured silicone system that sheds water and keeps its colour without being repainted every few years.

The practical upshot for Great Harwood homeowners is that you should expect a straight answer about whether a rendering job is what you actually need. Plenty of enquiries here turn into a smaller job than the one that was rung about, and a few turn into a different trade altogether. Either way you will be told before the work is booked rather than after it has started.

Much of the older housing here is stone and solid-walled, with the mix of previous repairs you would expect from properties that have been lived in continuously for over a century. Walls carry a slight roll, backgrounds are inconsistent, and patches from three different decades sit alongside each other. Working with that rather than against it is the whole trick: a repair matched into the wall as it actually is disappears, and one worked to a theoretical flat plane shows as a shadow line the first time low sunlight comes across it.

Great Harwood also produces a steady run of hallway and staircase work, which is worth calling out because it is the job most people put off longest and regret leaving. The stairwell is awkward: a high ceiling that cannot be reached from a step ladder, a wall that runs the full height of the house, and no easy way to sheet it without blocking the only route upstairs. Done properly it needs the access setting up once and the whole void worked in a single visit. Done badly, in pieces off a ladder over three evenings, it never quite matches and every join shows once the light comes through the front door.

On cost: Priced per elevation and driven mostly by area, access and whether scaffold is needed. External work is also weather-dependent, so dates get set with a bit of give in them. A single elevation is typically several days including cure time between coats, and depends heavily on the weather. Great Harwood sits inside the area Lee covers from Rossendale, along with Rishton, Clayton-le-Moors, Whalley, so a look and a written figure do not involve a wasted journey for either of us. Quotes are free and there is no call-out charge.