Considerations before rendering external walls
Applying a coat of rendering over external walls is good way of giving your house a facelift, especially if the current exterior is unattractive, in poor condition, or a mixture of different mismatched materials.
Changing and improving the exterior of your home is actually one of the most effective ways of adding value to your property, and new rendering is one of the cheapest ways of achieving this. You home’s exterior is the first thing that any visitors or potential buyers might see, so making sure it has got as much kerb appeal as possible is important.
Render can be sand and cement or a flexible, breathable polymer modified render for homes with solid walls. It can hide poor-quality or mismatched brickwork on period properties, and create a sleek finish on modern homes. It can come self-coloured or be painted later. Render works well with masonry or timber cladding, to add architectural interest, and can be matched with external insulation to warm up a draughty home.
- Rendering costs
- How to render a wall
- Planning permission
How much will rendering cost?
External rendering using a sand and cement ‘scratch coat’ and a finer render topcoat, followed by two coats of external masonry paint will cost in the region of £28–£34 per m². Rendering and painting a typical three-bedroom semi-detached house with 80m² of walls would therefore cost £2,240–£2,720.
Find a renderer
For a solid walled house or where the cavity is too narrow to apply sufficient levels of insulation you may wish to take this chance to add insulation. In this case an external wall insulation system is usually a better option than insulating internally as no space or architectural detail is lost within the property.
There are many different external wall insulation systems, but most of them are promoted on a supply and fix basis by specialists, so they’re not available to the DIY market.
Applying external insulation with a render finish typically costs £70–£90 per m². A typical three-bedroom semidetached house would require 80m², so it would cost £5,600–£7,200.
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