Rendering means two jobs that share a name. Outside, it is the coat that takes the weather off the brickwork and decides what the house looks like from the street. Inside, it is the backing coat that builds a solid wall out flat and plumb before anything gets skimmed over it.
The outside work is the one that goes wrong expensively, because render that fails does it slowly and out of reach. Most of what comes up around here is a rear extension that needs finishing, or a wall where somebody rendered over a problem twenty years ago and it is now coming off in sheets.
Looking at what is behind it first
Render is a finish, not a repair. If the brickwork behind it is wet, if the damp course has been bridged, or if the pointing has gone, rendering over the top hides it for a season and then fails along with it. So the wall gets looked at before anything is priced, and where the answer is that something else needs doing first, that is what gets said.
Where old render is coming off, tapping across the elevation finds the edges of it. Sound render rings solid; failed render sounds hollow and usually goes further than the cracked bit you can see. Cutting back to sound material is the first hour of the job and it decides the size of the rest of it.
Beads go on first: stop beads at the edges, bell beads above the damp course so water is thrown clear of the wall rather than running down behind it, and angle beads on the corners. On a rendered plinth the bead across the damp course line is the whole point, and leaving it out is how water gets up past a damp course that is working perfectly well.
The basecoat goes on and mesh is bedded into it, lapped at the joints and taken diagonally across the corners of every window and door, because that is where a render cracks first. Then the finish, whether that is a float finish in sand and cement or a through coloured system that never needs painting.
Inside, the backing coat does the structural part of the flatness. It builds the wall out where it is hollow, gets it plumb, and is scratched while green so the finish has something to grip. On a solid Victorian wall that has been hacked back, that coat is most of the work and the skim on top is the easy half.
Where the wall has had damp treated, the backing coat is a salt retardant mix rather than a standard one, and it is kept off the floor at the bottom. That is not a detail to skip: the salts that come out of a wall after a damp course will come straight through an ordinary backing coat and show on the paint within months.
A failed section can be cut out and made good rather than the whole elevation redone, and on a big wall that is a large saving. It is honest about what it will look like though: a patch in a float finish can be made almost invisible once painted, and a patch into a through coloured render will always be findable in the right light.
So the choice gets put plainly. Patch it, paint the elevation and it reads as one wall. Patch a coloured render and accept that you will know where it is. Or take the elevation back and do it once. Which of those is right is your call, and it gets made with the price for each in front of you.
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Only if what is there is sound and keyed. Rendering over hollow material means the new coat comes off with the old one, usually taking longer to fail than to do properly in the first place. It gets tapped over before anything is priced.
Do I need scaffolding?
For anything above single storey, yes, and it is priced separately so you can see what it is. A ladder is not a working platform for rendering and the finish shows it where somebody has tried.
Will it stop my wall being damp?
Not on its own. Render keeps weather off sound brickwork. If the wall is wet because the damp course is bridged, the pointing has failed or a gutter is running down it, that gets fixed first or the new render fails the same way the old one did.
How long before I can paint it?
Sand and cement render wants a month or so before it is painted, and a breathable masonry paint rather than a plastic one. A through coloured render does not get painted at all, which is most of the reason people choose it.
