Repairing the repairs
When you repair cracks in a rendered wall (textured render), any product you use to fill those cracks has to be textured OR you texture it so it matches the existing render… unless you want to do a truly dodgy bodgy job, which is unfortunately what the previous owner did. I’m not going to apologise for criticising someone else’s workmanship because it’s going to take me 5 times longer to “fix” the repairs that it would have done to repair them properly in the first place.
A couple of pictures of the dodgy repairs, one part I’ve started cleaning out the flat/shiny filler, the other I haven’t, yet.
To make cleaning out the shiny/flat filler easier, I decided to invest in one of those Multi Tools that can cut, sand, trim etc. Works pretty well and HEAPS faster than trying to chip it away with a paint scraper. This one from Stratco comes with 15 little sanding pads, 20 bigger ones, and a couple of cutting and scraping blades. I ended up using the wood cutting blade to chip away the old filler best.
After scraping filler away I’m giving those areas a coat of primer, then will fill any existing holes or cracks “properly” with Selleys No More Gaps Render Filler.
A day or so later I tried out the Selleys No More Gaps Render Filler – really good stuff. If only the cracks had been filled with this stuff the first time, I’d have had another couple of hours up my sleeve. Pic on left is a repair of a “repair”. The last pic on the right, is a repair of a fresh render crack that literally took me 2 minutes to fill and it will be painted over and you’ll never spot it was there.
Just grabbed some Render Filler straight from the ready mixed tub, squished it into the crack with my finger and used a coarse kitchen sponge to just brush away excess. No exageration, this took 2 minutes to do it properly.
The front was then primed, and I applied a coat of Dulux Texture Fine Cover to the entire front section which includes all of the dodgy external render repairs. Last two pictures show the same corner after the Dulux Texture Fine Cover.
