Rendering the Garden Wall

I decided some time ago that I wanted to render the raised border at the end of the garden. It was looking a little worse for wear, and whilst I do like things that look aged… this was just looking a mess. I also really disliked the change of brick between in bottom two layers. Obviously some bricks have been replaced for good reason, but this change just didn’t sit well with me. Some of the other bricks do need replacing as well, but rendering means we can hide this fact and get away with not replacing them. Hurrah!

Rendering requires quite a bit of time, and most importantly good weather! Not too hot mind, if it dries too fast it will crack. But definitely no rain! So I waited for the perfect day and got to work. First things first, I had a good sweep and clean of the area to remove any dust and weeds that were growing through the brickwork. I had already bought a pre-made bag of render that you just add water to, so not too much work was involved on that side of things. I wet the brick with a spray bottle, this helps the render ‘stick’ to the wall. At first I was really skeptical it would stick at all, but after finding think the right method, it worked amazingly!

I used a filling knife to get the render mix onto the wall and then a plastering trowel to smooth it. The border wasn’t exact ‘straight’ in vertical lines so that was an added difficulty. I’m certainly no expert…

The biggest struggle was the section of brick just before the corner. The bottom brick in this area was almost non-existent so there wasn’t much for the render to hold onto. You can see the gap it kept creating at the bottom of this photo…

I became aware that I wasn’t going to have enough render to finish the job, so I settled for just trying to make sure all the brickwork was covered by some render. This was the finish at the end of day 1..

I was really impressed! OK my rendering isn’t perfect, but the look as a whole was a huge improvement! Day 2 was adding more render to the wall to try and get a smoother more perfect finish, and in particular fixing that horrible corner section with the non-existent brick! I did a much better job this time around, although still not totally perfect. After that had dried the next day, I used some exterior filler to fill in any obvious gaps in the render which I then sanded down. It was looking MUCH better…

That stuff dries pretty quickly so I also managed to get the wall painted the same day. I used the colour ‘Sandstone’ in Homebase’s own brand masonry paint. And here’s the finished look! I’m super impressed with it… there’s no denying it has that perfect ‘professional’ finish, but come-on, it cost barely a fraction of the price! I think the corner turned out pretty darn well too!