This is a common question and a good one. As with most home projects, there are pro’s and con’s of rendering over existing external facings.

Climate needs to play a part in your decision making process because render (as with many other materials) will expand and shrink as weather temperatures change throughout the seasons. The amount of which depends on what state you live in, how high above sea level you are and the vegetation surrounding your home giving shade and/or slowing the drying process after the cold nights.

But for the purpose of this discussion, as we are based on Queensland’s Gold Coast, we will be referring to SE Qld weather patterns and conditions.

Let’s start with just a few of  the PRO’s;

• A rendered home will offer some individuality to your home. Here on the Gold Coast the predominant building material was brick veneer (sometimes double brick) which has resulted in some streets having over 90% of brick houses.
• Render means you can give the house a facelift in the future, any time you like and as often as you like.
• Rendering gives a home a modern appearance and one that can be updated by changing feature parts of the façade. Quite often, people can generally identify the date of a house based on the brick quite often.
• On a rendered building, if you decide to change a window or add a room or any other external alteration in the future, you will not have the time consuming problem of trying to match the same bricks that are no longer available. Or if they are available, what shade variation are they now?
• If you go for the acrylic render it will last much longer and require minimal maintenance.

Pro Comments from people when discussing rendered homes;

I personally love render. Everything is going to date at some stage, whether it be brick or render. Go for what you love (and can afford).

If you go for the acrylic render it will last much longer … my dad just redid his acrylic render home after 17 years … and it didn’t even really need doing, he just wanted a change of colour. He painted over his acrylic render himself … looks fantastic.

Our home which we built in 1989 was rendered and we never had to do anything to it. We never repainted it when we sold it 18 months ago as it still looks as good as when they first did it. We are currently building and will render again as it is so easy to maintain.

I love the different colours you can do with render, and in time you can change them very simply to give a whole new look for your house.

I think that render products must have improved in recent years. Whatever the reasons, the 3-4 year old homes in my area with full render in light colours look as good as new.

My husband wasn’t a fan of render, and I had to convince him to go with it …. he is now a big fan and says often that he is glad we went render instead of brick. It really is down to personal choice, we built before with brick and loved it at the time too … but now I am a fan of render

If I get sick of the colour, I’ll paint it. I was pretty sick of the bricks on our old house after 22 years…

Now on to the CON’s;

• It is imperative that you use a professional renderer who comes recommended. Poor rendering can result in cracks, chips and even ‘chunks’ falling off.
• Unless you have some good experience, it is not a great idea to DIY render you house (especially with bagged premixes)
• In comparison with bricks, a rendered home requires extra maintenance in washing (annually) and painting. How often you will need to paint depends on paint quality, application and surrounding environment but it is not unreasonable to expect 15 years or more before you need to consider painting your render.
• When building a new home, rendering at the time will add more to the final price

Con Comments from people when discussing rendered homes;

I’ve been warned about render cracking too, especially with the numerous changes in temperature we experience in Melbourne..

Nobody can give a straight answer as to how often render needs to be painted? Does it need to be washed? Does it get mouldy?

Shop around for a good renderer. I work for a abseiling company and most of our work is render repairs, especially with the joints which haven’t been cut deep enough to allow for movement, hence the cracking..

In the past I saw a lot of light-coloured rendered houses a few years old that looked like they need a good scrub. Stains from water running down the render, rusty marks and so on. I suspect that poor design or not so good workmanship on the spouting was the main cause.

Why don’t you just have a feature wall with render, lots of nice houses out there with this.

Although we liked the look of full render, we ended up using mostly brick on our house, with a couple feature areas of render – the columns at the front of the house and either side of the garage. We are very happy with the result so far, I think it gives a nice look to the house and we can update the look of the house just with a quick repaint of the render in future if we wish (we have gone for a neutral brick which I don’t think will date very quickly).

Only $800 for front render compared to the thousands to do whole house … if we decide we want full render in the future, we can always do it, bit hard to go from full render back to brick.

Originally posted 2016-05-21 06:48:44.