One issue with the house which was immediately apparent when we originally looked round it was that there was a problem with the external rendering. Knowing nothing at all about rendering, it came as quite a shock when the surveyor advised it all had to come off and be completely be redone since the previous owners had only had the house re-rendered themselves a few years prior. Evidently the wrong type of render had been applied. Indeed it’s questionable whether it was even render that was applied at all or if it was just wet sand!
Still, to our unknowledgable selves, this poses the fundamental question of what is the correct type of render? So much have we thought about and researched this question, I’m sure it will come up in future blog posts, so I shall just refer to it as the “R” question. It also opens up a whole different can of worms for us in thinking about the order in which we do various work that’s needed. The former garage which has been poorly converted into a study needs to be structurally changed and we’d quite like to do a small extension – both of which would make sense to complete before undertaking a re-rendering.
Even the “R” question aside, there’s one issue for debate.
The current finish on the house is a smooth render which has cracked and discoloured in places which leads me to yet a further question of does a smooth finished render ever look good for more than a year or so? ..and if we’re going to have to rerender the whole place, should we take this opportunity to perhaps opt for an alternative finish?
Trawling the interwebs, we came across this picture of Oakleigh from the 1970s:
..which clearly shows the house formerly had a smooth rendered finish, although whether this in-turn was also not the original finish, who knows.
I’m not convinced that removing the render and just leaving the house as brick is an option, so I think we’re faced with the following 3 options:
- Re-render with a smooth finish and hope it’s just a better job this time.
- Pebbledash and paint
- Roughcast of some form
In our street, there are 4 of our house. 2 Have been pebbledashed and painted, 1 has fancy roughcast.
I actually personally like the roughcast/painted pebbledash finish, but keeping the house smooth would seem to be more sympathetic maybe to it’s architecture?! Oh the decisions! Comments and suggestions most welcome!