Hucknall is about 5 miles north-west of Mapperley, at the northern end of the tram line. Coal made the town: Top Pit was sunk off Watnall Road in 1861 and Bottom Pit off Portland Road in 1866, and mining turned Hucknall into a market town in under a century. New homes are still being added today, so indoor plastering here runs from tired older rooms to new-build finishes.
Plastering an older Hucknall house
If your house was built in Hucknall's early colliery decades, it probably has solid brick walls with a few layers of history on them: old wallpaper, filled cracks, painted-over patches and perhaps a textured ceiling. Once everything is stripped back, the plaster underneath tells you what is needed. Sound plaster can take a fresh skim. Areas that sound hollow when tapped have come away from the brick and must be cut out and rebuilt first, or the new finish will crack along with them.
A renovation like this often starts with a rewire. The chases cut for new cables and back boxes are filled first, then the whole wall is skimmed, because a line of patches on an otherwise old wall nearly always shows through paint once the light catches it.
Textured ceilings often turn up in rooms redecorated during the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than scraping, a deep texture is filled level with a bonding coat and then skimmed, which leaves the old coating sealed underneath. Anything applied before 2000 should be tested for asbestos before it is sanded, drilled or scraped.
Staircases and landings are often left until the end because of the access they need, but doing them alongside the rest of the house avoids a hallway that looks shabby next to freshly plastered rooms.
New homes on the old Rolls-Royce land
Persimmon's phase 5b, 150 homes on the former Rolls-Royce land off Watnall Road, was approved in 2023, and the whole estate will have more than 900 properties. New houses on estates like this are typically dry-lined, with tapered-edge plasterboard and filled joints. That surface is fine to paint, but it marks more easily than a skimmed wall and shows small cracks as the house settles in its first couple of years. Once the builder's warranty period has run its course, a skim over the boards gives a harder surface, and it is a good moment to do it if you are redecorating anyway.
Covering all of Hucknall
From Butler's Hill and Westville to Beauvale and the West Hucknall Estates, call 07877 353120 or send photos through the enquiry form, with a rough idea of how many rooms are involved. We work seven days a week from 7am to 5pm.
