Watch a wall change
Drag the sliders. Bare and boarded on one side, skimmed on the other.
Tired, rough or patched walls re-skimmed flat and ready for paint. Exeter and Devon, free quotes by WhatsApp.
Skimming is the thin top coat that makes a wall flat. Most of the plastering we do is exactly this.
Most plastering jobs in a house are skims. A thin finishing coat over what is already there, whether that is old walls, fresh plasterboard or a repair that needs blending in. Get it right and the wall is dead flat, nothing showing when the light catches it. Get it wrong and you see every pass of the trowel the first time you put a lamp on.
People have us in for all sorts. Old uneven walls that have had forty years of wallpaper on them, fresh board in an extension, one knackered ceiling. What decides how long a skim lasts is the prep underneath it. Clean, solid, sealed, so the plaster grips. That is the part cheap jobs skip, and it is why cheap jobs crack.
Drag the sliders. Bare and boarded on one side, skimmed on the other.
Internal plastering, from a single ceiling to a whole house.
Tired, cracked or patchy walls and ceilings skimmed back flat.
Textured or uneven surfaces prepared and skimmed flat for a modern finish.
New plasterboard fixed and dot-and-dabbed ready to skim, for walls and ceilings.
Finishing coats over new plasterboard in extensions and renovations.
Smooth ceiling finishes, including after artex removal or water damage.
Full strip and start again, for when a room is past saving.
A proper skim is dead flat. No trowel lines, no shadows when the light rakes across from a window. Paint goes on better and the room just looks right, even if you could not say exactly why.
Fresh plaster wants a few days to a couple of weeks to dry right through. It goes from dark to an even pale pink, and when it is pale all over it is ready. Mist coat first, watered-down emulsion, then your colour.
Curved ceilings, arched reveals and boxed steels. The awkward stuff is where a skim earns its keep.
Wall needs boarding before it can be skimmed? See plasterboarding & dry lining, we do both so the skim goes on flat.
New to this? Do you need a plasterer or a builder sorts out who does what, and you can read about George, who'll be the one on the trowel.
We cover all aspects of plastering and rendering, right across Devon.
Every wall is different, but here's what actually moves the price.
A sound wall that just needs a skim is quick. One that's blown, damp or covered in old artex needs hacking off and prepping first. That's where the time goes.
Lath-and-plaster and uneven period walls take considerably longer than modern plasterboard. Exeter has a lot of both.
A boxroom and a double-height stairwell are very different jobs. Ceilings, awkward corners and high work all add time.
Re-boarding, patching, taping and filling all happen before a trowel touches the wall. Often it's most of the job.
Doing several rooms in one visit works out cheaper per room than calling us back three times.
Working around a deadline or a tenant changeover sometimes means longer days. We'll tell you if that changes anything.
The honest answer is we can't price a wall we haven't seen. Send a photo on WhatsApp and we'll come back with a straight number, usually the same day, and it's a fixed price, not an estimate that creeps.
Give it 7 to 14 days, and go by the colour rather than the calendar, plus you'll need a mist coat first or the paint will peel. Full detail here: how long before you can paint new plaster.
Not the same job, and quoting the wrong one is where plastering goes wrong. Here's the difference, and a quick test you can do yourself with a spirit level.
Send a quick WhatsApp with a photo and we'll get you a free quote. No call-out charge, no hard sell.