Silicone Render in Formby

Formby. A detached house lifted out of tired brick into a white through-colour silicone render, with the brick kept on the ground floor, the bay and the porch.

What the customer wanted

A detached house in Formby, brick from the ground to the eaves, with dark stained frames and a tile roof. Nothing wrong with it. It just read as forty years old from the end of the drive, and the brick had gone patchy in the way brick does on an exposed plot near the coast.

What they did not want was the house turned into a white box. The brief was to lift it without losing the material it was built from.

What was done

The upper storey and the gable went into a white through-colour silicone render. The ground floor, the bay and the porch stayed as brick. That split is the whole idea: the render does the lifting, the brick keeps the house looking like a house, and the eye has somewhere to rest instead of a single flat plane from ground to roof.

The system is the one every silicone job here is built up with. The substrate is checked and anything unsound comes off first, then basecoat with alkali-resistant mesh bedded into it, primer, then the through-colour top coat. Through-colour matters on a house like this because the colour is in the render rather than painted on, so there is nothing to repaint in five years.

The frames were left exactly as they were. The mahogany against white render is a large part of why the house still looks like itself.

The finish

The detail that decides a job like this is the line where render meets brick, which is the second photograph. It stops on a bead, dead straight, with the brick clean up to it. Get that line wrong and it is the only thing anybody sees.

External render is weather work rather than calendar work. The top coat does not go on with frost or driving rain forecast, because a finish that gets rained on before it has cured will craze or bloom and nothing afterwards fixes it. A scaffolded house this size is measured in weeks rather than days, and some of those days are spent waiting.

The full build-up, and what it costs to do properly, is on the silicone rendering page. This job was in Formby.

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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