Silicone Render in Birkdale

Birkdale. A detached house taken from bare red brick to an insulated white silicone render, photographed at all three stages.

What the customer wanted

A detached house in Birkdale, red brick throughout, with an attached garage and a plain gable end. Solid enough, but it had reached the age where the brick had gone blotchy and the whole thing read as dated from the pavement. They wanted it in white, and they wanted it warmer than it was.

What was there

Brick, and a lot of it, on a house with wide flat elevations and very little relief in them. That matters more than it sounds. A big plain elevation shows every ripple once it is one colour, so the flatness of the coat underneath is the whole job, and there is nothing on the front to hide behind.

The garage and the front door sit in the middle of that elevation, which means beads, stop ends and cut-ins around openings that are all in plain sight.

What we did

Scaffold up first, then the elevations checked over and anything unsound taken off. Insulation boards were fixed back to the brick, which is where the warmth comes from, then the basecoat with alkali-resistant mesh bedded into it wet, then primer, then a through-colour silicone top coat in white.

Beads on every angle, stop beads at every edge, and the openings cut in by hand. The order matters: mesh into wet basecoat, primer once that has gone off, top coat only when the forecast gives a dry window. A top coat rained on before it has cured crazes, and no amount of goodwill afterwards fixes it.

A scaffolded detached house is measured in weeks rather than days, and some of those days are spent waiting on weather rather than working.

The finish

One clean white plane across the front, the garage and the gable, with the brick plinth kept at the bottom. Through-colour, so the white is in the render rather than painted on it and there is nothing to repaint in five years.

It is a different house from the road, and the insulation behind it means it holds heat in a way the brick never did.

The full system and what drives the price are on the silicone rendering page, and stripping a failed finish first is on external rendering. This job was in Birkdale.

The stage in the middle that nobody photographs

This is what a house looks like halfway through, and it is the stage that decides everything. Insulation boards fixed back to the brick, then the basecoat with the alkali-resistant mesh bedded into it while it is still wet, not laid on top of it afterwards. The mesh is what stops the finish cracking along the board joints.

Rendering looks alarming in the middle, when the wall is neither brick nor render. Knowing that is coming is the difference between a stressful fortnight and a straightforward one.

Questions people ask about this

What customers say

4.6 out of 5 from 11 reviews on Google. Every review below is verbatim from that profile.

See all 11 Google reviews

Areas we cover

Based on Liverpool Road in Southport. We work right along the Sefton coast, down into Liverpool, and inland across West Lancashire as far as Preston. Every town below has a page of its own.

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