DIY rendering

[garak112]

The entire exterior of my house needs re-rendering because of a poor application of some kind of spray topcoat. This topcoat is peeling off in large sheets and where it has come off the wall in the room behind is getting damp.

I have had a couple of guys round to quote in the last 6 months and spoke to a couple more on the phone. The two thy inspected found a couple of small issues in isolated areas of the base render and they planned to cut back and refill with sand and cement before putting a thin coat render over the top of everything.

Guy 1 decided that he didn't want to do it in the end because of needing to remove the top coat (he was talking about £3.5k until he pulled out. Guy 2 wanted nearly £6k which seemed ridiculous given the size of the building (iirc 130 sqm needed rendering of which 80% was ground floor level.

As far as I can see this is a fairly unskilled job until you get to applying render:

Strip topcoat(scrapers and rotary sander)
Widen cracks
Fill cracks
Apply sbr
Position drop beads
Render
????
Profit

I have plastered before so I can do it, have I missed anything out? Any tips?

 

[eniacs]

It is a fairly easy unskilled job like you say. Although if it is a large area it can become logistically complicated. The renderer's (SP?) would certainly have planned to do each wall in one go, rather than slowly putting on half, then a while later coming back and finishing the job. Apparently it is quite noticeable if you have to join cement which is set to non set cement if you see what i mean.

If your walls are small that you can do each piece individually in a day then great stuff get on and do it. Like you say, its not drastically different to plastering.

I've done only small bits of garden wall, but it was pretty easy and that garden wall still looks good now. You can mix in sbr to your topcoat cement to make it waterproof as well as applying it beforehand. Have a look at the bottle for mixing quantities. For the sbr direct to the wall, I also mixed in cement. This has the effect of filling minor holes and providing a nice key for the coat of render.

Good luck and put some photos up if you go ahead with it.