Lime Plastering is a specialist lime plastering contractor working throughout Harlow and the wider Essex area. As an established Essex town, Harlow has a large stock of pre-1919 property built from soft red brick — walls that were designed to breathe. We restore them using traditional lime plaster, lime render and lime mortar, never cement or gypsum.
Sympathetic repair in Harlow means matching what is already there — the aggregate colour, the coat thickness, the texture of the original float finish. We take samples from the existing soft red brick before mixing so new work sits alongside old rather than standing out.
Harlow and the villages around it retain a good deal of soft red brick. Where that material is soft — as most traditional Essex walling is — the mortar and plaster must always be softer than the masonry, so it wears sacrificially instead of eroding the stone or brick face.
Softness is the point. Traditional Essex walling of soft red brick is weaker than modern cement, so a hard mortar concentrates stress and moisture into the masonry face. Lime is deliberately the weaker material, and that is what makes it correct for Harlow's older homes.
Once the survey is agreed, we protect the site, strip back the failed finish, and apply lime in successive coats with proper curing between each. In the dry, cold easterly exposure of the eastern counties we control drying with damp hessian or sheeting so the work carbonates evenly rather than cracking.
The jobs below are typical of the work we carry out on Harlow property — the building types and problems vary, but the answer is always breathable lime rather than cement.
estate farmworker's cottage — An estate farmworker's cottage in Harlow where hard cement render had trapped moisture against clay lump and cob. We stripped the render back to bare wall, allowed the masonry to dry, then rebuilt the finish in three coats of lime and limewashed it.
Georgian merchant's house — Peeling modern masonry paint on a Georgian merchant's house in Essex. The impermeable coating was removed, minor render defects were patched in lime, and the elevations were finished in several thin coats of limewash.
market-town shopfront property — Persistent ground-floor damp in a market-town shopfront property in Harlow previously treated with injected DPC and waterproof render. Once the real moisture path was identified, the walls were replastered in lime and the damp resolved without chemical treatment.
Yes. We take samples of the surviving mortar or plaster from the clay lump and cob first, then match aggregate, colour and texture so the repair blends into the original rather than patching over it.
We do. Harlow is one of our core areas and we travel throughout Essex and the surrounding parts of East of England for lime plastering, lime render, lime pointing and heritage repair.
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 Harlow in Essex and the wider East of England area.
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