Teesside plastering FAQs

£300 to £600 to skim an average room including the ceiling, £180 to £300 for a ceiling alone, £200 to £400 to board a room, £500 to £1,000 to board and skim, £1,800 to £3,500 for a full three-bed re-skim, £40 to £70 per square metre for external render, coving from £150 a room and patch repairs from £80.

Yes. The rooms get looked at and measured, the price comes back in writing, and you decide in your own time. No charge and no pressure.

Almost always because they describe different jobs. One may be skimming over existing plaster while the other has priced stripping the wall and boarding it. Ask what is coming off, how many coats are going on and who removes the waste.

Yes, noticeably. Setup, mixing, drying and waste removal overlap, so a whole house done in one programme costs less per room than the same rooms booked separately over a year.

Wait until the whole surface is a uniform pale colour with no dark patches. Commonly four to seven days in a warm ventilated house, and it can pass two weeks in a cold empty one. The first coat should be a watered-down mist coat.

Gentle background heat and ventilation help. Blasting one wall with a fan heater dries the surface faster than the depth, which causes cracking and crazing. Patience is cheaper than doing it twice.

A skim is a wet trade with splashes and a bit of dust from preparation. A strip-out or an Artex removal is a different order of mess entirely. Floors should be sheeted and waste bagged as part of the job.

For one or two rooms, no. For a whole-house re-skim it is far quicker and cheaper if the house is empty, which is why so much of this work happens between buying and moving in.

If it is firmly stuck, dry and reasonably flat, yes, and that is the cheapest route. Tap it first: a hollow, drummy note means the backing has let go and skimming over it only postpones the problem.

It may if it was applied before 2000. Undisturbed or plastered over it is not a hazard. If you want it removed, have a small sample tested by a UKAS-accredited laboratory first, and never dry-sand or scrape it to find out.

Skim over a sound ceiling, board over a cracked or dipping one. Both come in at £300 to £600 a room. The Artex guide compares them alongside full removal.

No. A skim is a couple of millimetres thick and follows what is underneath. Dot and dab boarding over the top is what gives a flat, plumb wall.

£40 to £70 per square metre depending on the system, so around £1,200 to £2,500 for a gable and £4,000 to £8,000 for a full semi. Check whether scaffolding is inside that figure or quoted separately.

A flexible thin-coat silicone system over a base coat and mesh handles the salt and driven rain along the Redcar, Saltburn and Seaton Carew strip better than a dense sand and cement mix, and it does not need repainting.

Not until the water is stopped and the wall has dried out. Plastering onto a damp wall traps moisture and salts, and the finish blisters or stains within months.

On a flat plastered wall a good patch disappears under paint. Matching a textured or Artex pattern convincingly is very difficult, which is why those rooms usually end up skimmed or over-boarded instead.