Barry Pebble Dash Repair and Re-Dashing

Ask anyone who has lived in Barry for a while and they will tell you the wind off the Channel finds every weak spot in a house. For homes finished in pebble dash, that weak spot is often a crack you can barely see from the pavement, letting rain soak in behind the coating until a section bulges or falls away.

Barry has a wide mix of property: dock-era terraces climbing the hills above the old port, inter-war and post-war estates on the edges of town, seafront houses near Barry Island, and plenty of homes that are rented out. Much of it carries dash that is now forty, fifty or seventy years old.

We help with all of it, from sealing a single crack to re-dashing a whole house, cleaning stained walls or rendering over a coat that has failed. We work for owner-occupiers, landlords and local businesses, and we always explain what we have found before suggesting what to do.

How Barry's homes and coastline affect pebble dash

Barry grew at speed around 1900, when its docks were built to ship coal from the Valleys. The town that came with them is full of brick terraces on steep streets, many later dashed on the side and rear walls, along with bay-fronted houses that had dash added to the upper storey. Later decades brought large housing estates such as Gibbonsdown and the developments around Colcot and Palmerstown, where dash was a standard finish.

The weather here is coastal through and through. Prevailing south-westerly winds bring rain and salt spray across the water, and homes on high ground or facing the sea take the full force. Dash that has been exposed to that for decades usually shows some of these signs:

• Cracks radiating from window and door corners
• Hollow areas that sound dull when tapped, particularly on upper floors
• Pebbles washing out to leave bare, grey patches
• Damp coming through to internal walls after heavy rain

Because many Barry properties are let, repairs are sometimes put off between tenancies. We often find that a small, early repair would have saved a much larger job, so it pays to look at cracks as soon as they appear.

Common pebble dash jobs around Barry

• Filling cracks around windows and doors on terraces and semis
• Replacing blown sections of dash on exposed upper floors
• Full re-dashing for houses where the coat is failing all over
• Repairs and tidying up for landlords between lets
• Work on shops and commercial units in the town centre

The most common request we get in Barry is pebble dash crack repair. We rake out the crack, check the render on either side for hollowness and make good with a compatible mix and matched aggregate. If the tapping test shows the coat has come away from the wall across a large area, filling cracks alone will not hold for long, and we would talk to you about re-dashing instead.

For houses where owners have had enough of dash altogether, we can look at pebble dash removal, after first checking whether the brick or block underneath is in a fit state to be exposed or re-rendered.