Property Maintenance in Coulsdon (CR5)
Coulsdon is a town of Edwardian and 1930s houses, and houses of that age carry a lot of outside detail. Timber, sills, rendered panels and decorative brickwork all need looking after, and all of them give plenty of warning before they turn expensive.
The timber on the outside of a 1930s house
Interwar houses carry a fair amount of external joinery: window frames and sills, fascias and soffits, bargeboards on the gables, and often a timber porch or canopy.
All of it depends on a paint film that lasts a few years, and once that film has cracked the water gets behind it and stays there. What follows is wet rot, and wet rot stays a repair problem rather than a replacement problem for a surprisingly long time. A rotten sill can usually be cut out and a new section spliced in; a fascia can be replaced in lengths rather than right round the house. The mistake is painting over soft timber because it looks tidier that way, which buys one summer and costs you the whole component. The joinery, brickwork and plastering on a job like that is our own team's. Decorating is a specialist trade, so the decorators come in under us and are managed by us.
Rendered panels, pointing and decorative brickwork
Where an interwar house has a rendered or pebbledashed panel, commonly on a gable or the face of a bay, that panel is a separate thing to look after from the brickwork below it. Cracks let water in behind the finish, and the tell-tale is a hollow sound rather than a visible defect. Cutting out the loose area and rebuilding it in matching coats is a straightforward repair; skimming over the top is not. The brickwork itself, and the string courses, arches and copings that Edwardian and 1930s builders liked, need their pointing kept sound, and a coping keeps water out of everything below it.
The older streets and the conservation areas
Coulsdon also has Victorian and Edwardian terraces, and streets sitting inside conservation areas where what a repair looks like matters as much as whether it works.
On those properties the sensible default is like for like: the same profile of joinery, the same joint in the pointing, the same texture of render. It is rarely more expensive to do a repair properly than to do it twice, and on a protected street a wrong-looking repair becomes a problem in its own right. We check what applies before starting, put the repairs into a written list in the order that makes sense, and let you decide what happens now and what waits until next year.
More in Coulsdon
Everything we do in Coulsdon is on the Coulsdon area sheet, and the full detail of how we approach this trade is on the building maintenance page.
Common questions
Q.01Can a rotten window sill be repaired, or does the whole window go?
Very often just the sill. Sound timber is cut back, a new section spliced in and the whole thing finished, which costs a fraction of a replacement window and keeps the original where the house is better for having it.
Q.02How often should the outside of a house like mine be painted?
Less by the calendar than by the state of the timber. Rather than a fixed cycle, look at the joinery every couple of years and repaint a face when that face needs it, instead of the whole house at once.
Q.03There is a crack in the render. Is that serious?
Usually not in itself, but it is a way in for water. The real question is how much render around it has lost its bond, and you find that by sounding the panel rather than by looking at it.
Q.04Do you handle small repairs?
Yes. Guttering, pointing, a section of fascia, a door that has dropped — small jobs are worth grouping into one visit, and we price them item by item so you can see what each one costs.
Thinking about building maintenance in Coulsdon?
Tell us what you are planning. We come out, look at the job properly and give you a price for it.