Plasterer in Leicester

Local to Leicester

The city's older housing stock, particularly the dense Victorian terraces around Clarendon Park, Stoneygate and Highfields, was mostly plastered with lime or early gypsum decades ago, and a lot of it has been patched inexpertly over the years by previous owners or quick-turnaround landlords. We see a lot of ceilings that have been artexed to hide cracking rather than the cracking being properly addressed, plus solid-wall damp coming through in terraces that were never built with a cavity to stop moisture reaching the inner wall. Further out in the 1930s semis around Knighton and Oadby, cracking tends to be more about the clay-heavy soil shifting with the seasons than anything structurally serious, though it needs the same careful diagnosis to stop it recurring rather than a quick fill each time it opens up. New-build estates on the city's edge are a different job entirely, mostly straightforward skimming on fresh plasterboard with none of the older housing stock's history to work around.

Common plasterer problems in Leicester

The two problems that come up again and again in Leicester are artexed ceilings hiding cracking that's never been fixed properly, and damp patches in solid-wall Victorian terraces where a previous repair skimmed straight over the cause rather than dealing with it. We also regularly find plaster in older shared houses that's been patched by several different hands over several tenancies, with visible joins where the texture and thickness never quite matched. We always check what's behind a crack or a damp patch before we touch it, since re-skimming without dealing with the cause just means doing the job twice within a year or two.