Plasterer in Melton Mowbray

Local to Melton Mowbray

Many of the older cottages around Melton and the surrounding villages are built from local stone or soft handmade brick with lime mortar and render, which needs to breathe rather than being sealed in with a modern cement-based render. Sealing one of these walls with the wrong material traps moisture inside and causes worse damp problems than the ones it was meant to fix, sometimes taking years to show up as damp patches or crumbling internal plaster. In the town centre itself, the Georgian and Victorian buildings often have decorative plasterwork and coving that's original, worth preserving rather than stripping out when a room's being renovated, and we've had jobs where restoring the original was cheaper than a full replacement would have been. Newer estates on the edge of town are far more straightforward, standard skimming and dry lining work with none of the older properties' material considerations. Out in the villages, we regularly see farmhouses and barn conversions where the original stonework has been rendered at different points over several decades, sometimes with three or four incompatible materials layered on top of each other.

Common plasterer problems in Melton Mowbray

The biggest issue we see around Melton is modern cement-based render trapping moisture in older solid-wall cottages, causing damp that gets blamed on the building when the render is at fault and needs replacing with a breathable alternative. In town centre properties, original coving and cornicing is sometimes damaged during renovation work by people unfamiliar with how to work around it carefully. We're often called in after another tradesperson's flagged a damp issue they suspect is render-related but couldn't diagnose with confidence themselves.