We were called in to clean an old scratch render recently. Someone had tried before us with a pressure washer and had started to cause a lot of damage to the old render, but luckily they were stopped before it was too late…

This was an 18 year old K-Rend scratch render. It was Ivory when it was new, but had faded to a grubby white with lots of dirt, grim and black & red algae. They had put a scaffold up on one gable to carry out repairs to the copes and this allowed us a close up view of some of the worst red algae we have ever seen. 18 years of no maintenance and it was almost beyond saving. It took us 6 or more treatments to get this gable back to a suitable condition for the painter to get started.

The rest of the building, whilst it had no maintenance over the same 18 years, was in much better condition and just needed a good wash and clean down. It just goes to show how good some of these scratch renders can be…

Please don’t leave your render to get this bad. The right type of maintenance on a regular basis saves money in the long run.

This was the west facing gable before we started