House renderers in Sheffield

What whole-house rendering involves

A whole-house job starts with scaffold round every elevation being treated, and if it stands on the pavement the scaffolder needs Sheffield City Council's permit to occupy the highway. Fittings come off the walls and glazing, doors and paving are protected. Each wall is then sounded: tapping gives a solid note where render is bonded and a hollow one where it has let go. Failed render is hacked back to the masonry; render that is sound and flat can sometimes stay as the background for a new system.

After the masonry is repaired, beads are fixed: a bell-cast bead at the damp-proof course so the render finishes above it, angle beads on the corners and stop beads where render meets retained brick, stone or a frame. Then the new system goes on. A thin-coat silicone finish sits on a meshed base coat of a few millimetres; a monocouche such as K Rend's K Mono goes on in one pass at about 17-18 mm and is scraped back; a lime render is built up in three coats with about a week between them. Each face is finished in one continuous session, and the weather governs the pace: K Rend's thin-coat data sheet, for example, asks for at least 5C and no frost, strong sun or wind.

Matching the job to the state of the house

Start from what the walls are doing, not the finish you would like. If the render is sound everywhere but faded, stained or patchy after repairs, the house needs cleaning, small repairs and a coating, not new render; see recolouring the whole house. If tapping finds hollow areas in a few places on several walls, a house-wide programme of cut-out repairs may be enough; see render repairs across the house. Once hollow areas join up across most faces, or pebbledash is coming away, repairing costs the house more disruption than it saves, and a full strip and re-render is the better job.

Two conditions change the material rather than the scale. A solid stone house under hard cement render or pebbledash may be holding damp behind it; SPAB explains that impervious cement restricts evaporation and traps water once it cracks, and the answer there is often lime. And any whole-house re-render raises the question of insulation, because Approved Document L treats re-rendering as renovation: once more than a quarter of the envelope is renovated, the walls are expected to be improved where that is technically, functionally and economically feasible. That is the point to compare render alone with external wall insulation.

Sheffield houses and the rules for whole-house work

Older villages inside Sheffield's boundary bring their own considerations. The council's management proposals for Grenoside describe nineteenth-century terraces and houses built for quarry workers, millstone makers and metal finishers, and list walls rendered with concrete among the changes that have weakened its historic buildings. That is a reminder that on an older stone house the choice of render is a planning matter as well as a technical one.

Under the householder permitted development rules, cladding any part of a house with render, pebble dash, stone, timber, plastic or tiles is not permitted development in conservation areas and National Parks. Sheffield has conservation areas across the city, and the council notes that High and Low Bradfield are in the Peak District National Park, whose authority handles planning there. Flats have no householder permitted development rights at all. If your house is in one of these places, talk to the planning authority before the whole-house specification is fixed, and read the area's appraisal, which explains the materials that matter.

The guides on this site take each part of a whole-house re-render in turn: stripping pebbledash, the systems, insulation, colour and phasing. For one wall or a small repair, a single-elevation approach is usually more sensible than anything described here.