Rendering in Eaglehawk.

Heritage walls need a different render.

A lot of Eaglehawk dates to the 1860s gold boom, and many of its cottages are solid double-brick with no damp course, built to breathe through the brick and soft lime mortar. The single biggest mistake on these walls is coating them in a hard modern cement render. It seals the moisture in, the damp rises, the salt crystallises behind the render, and within a few years it blows off the wall in sheets. The correct approach is a breathable lime-based render, see cement and lime rendering, which lets the wall keep releasing moisture.

The Heritage Overlay.

Eaglehawk’s historic core, around the main street and the older residential blocks, falls under a Heritage Overlay in the City of Greater Bendigo planning scheme. Changing the external finish of a contributory or listed building can need a planning permit, and a lime mix is often a condition. We check the overlay status of your property before quoting any heritage render so the work is compliant as well as correct.

Salt damp and render repairs.

The most common Eaglehawk call-out is render that is blowing off the bottom metre of an old wall, that is salt damp, not a render fault. The fix is to treat the rising moisture, hack off the failed render, and re-render in a breathable lime mix. Patching over salt-damp render without treating the cause just moves the problem up the wall. See render repairs for how we diagnose and fix it.

Newer Eaglehawk homes.

Not all of Eaglehawk is heritage. The newer brick-veneer homes on the edges of the township are standard acrylic render and texture coating work, the same as anywhere in Greater Bendigo. We do both, and we know which wall in front of us is which.