We provide conservation-grade lime plastering across Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Whether you are repairing damp internal walls in a soft red brick property, stripping failed cement render, or repointing stonework, our craftsmen work only in lime — the material Dunstable's period buildings were originally constructed with.
Damp in Dunstable homes is usually caused by the wrong material rather than a faulty building. Where cement render has been applied over soft red brick, stripping it back and re-rendering in lime normally resolves the damp within a single drying season.
Around Dunstable you will find timber-framed and pargetted cottages alongside later Georgian merchant houses. Both were built with lime, and both suffer when a modern impermeable finish is applied over the top — the moisture has to go somewhere, and it goes into the masonry and the timbers.
In the dry, cold easterly exposure of the eastern counties, an impermeable render is a liability: water gets in at cracks and reveals and then cannot leave. Lime render on a Dunstable wall handles that water, releasing it back out through the surface instead of pushing it deeper into the structure.
Every Dunstable job begins with diagnosis: identifying where moisture is entering before any plaster goes on. We then remove failed material, prepare the soft red brick, and build the lime up in coats, allowing each one to cure before the next.
Because clay lump, flint and timber frame are common and intolerant of cement, Dunstable throws up a particular set of problems. These are representative examples of how we resolve them in lime.
clay lump cottage — Blown gypsum plaster and tide marks on the ground floor of a clay lump cottage in Bedfordshire. We hacked off the gypsum, applied a haired lime base coat and a lime putty finish, and specified clay paint so the wall could keep drying.
flint barn conversion — A commercial flint barn conversion on a Dunstable high street within a conservation area. Decayed render and mouldings were reinstated in lime, run in situ to the original profiles, and finished to match neighbouring frontages.
estate farmworker's cottage — Consented repairs to a listed estate farmworker's cottage in Bedfordshire. Sample panels were prepared for the conservation officer, mortar analysis informed the mix, and the historic surface was conserved and patched rather than replaced wholesale.
It depends on the wall and its exposure. For most Bedfordshire work we use lime putty with local pit sand, often finished with traditional pargetting, stepping up to a more hydraulic lime only where exposure or the substrate genuinely demands it.
Every property is different, so we do not publish fixed prices. Cost depends on the substrate, the number of coats, access and whether failed cement has to be removed first. We survey the property in Dunstable and provide a written, no-obligation quote.
We do. Lime repointing is a large part of our Dunstable workload — raking out hard cement pointing and replacing it with a softer, sacrificial lime mortar that protects the masonry face instead of eroding it.
Lime cures slowly by carbonation. Allow roughly a week per coat as a guide, and longer in the dry, cold easterly exposure of the eastern counties. We protect the work and control drying so the finish cures evenly rather than cracking or dusting.
Our lime plastering, render and pointing teams also cover these towns and cities close to Dunstable in Bedfordshire and the wider East of England area.
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