It is also work that happens inside someone's home, often while they are living in it, and that shapes how we approach it as much as the trowel work does.
The finish standard is different inside
An exterior wall is seen from ten metres away and usually carries a texture that hides minor variation. An interior wall is seen from close range, frequently lit from the side by a window or a downlight, and any waviness in the surface will be obvious in the shadows.
Interior work gets floated and finished to a much finer standard as a result. Polished and burnished cement finishes, which have become popular as feature walls, are finer again and take multiple passes to build up.
Dust protection is part of the job
Rendering inside a house makes a mess if it is not managed. Cement dust travels, it settles into carpet and soft furnishings, and it gets into ducted air conditioning and spreads through the whole house.
We seal off the work area with plastic and tape, cover floors properly rather than dropping a sheet down, tape over return air vents, and clean down at the end of every day rather than at the end of the job. Clients should not be living in a dust cloud for a fortnight.
Curved walls and heritage restoration
Curved walls, bay windows, arched openings and vaulted ceilings all have to be worked by hand and by eye. There is no straight edge that helps you on a curve, and getting a consistent radius across a bay window is genuinely skilled work.
We do a steady amount of heritage restoration through the Inner West and inner city, matching original lime based finishes and profiles. On these jobs the mix is deliberately soft and breathable to suit the original brickwork, and using a modern high cement mix would slowly damage the building.
Feature walls
Polished concrete look finishes on internal feature walls have gone from occasional to constant over the last few years, and for good reason. They give a room a solid, tactile surface that paint cannot match, and every wall comes out slightly different.
That variation is the point. If you want a perfectly uniform surface, paint is the answer. If you want a wall with depth and movement in it where the light catches, a hand finished render is the only way to get there.