Point Chev new build exterior
The rendered walls on a new build in Point Chevalier. The homeowner got in touch to help get the project finished — and on a house like this one, the render is the part everything else is measured against.
- Location
- Point Chevalier, Auckland
- Scope
- New build exterior — rendered walls
- Substrate
- Render
- Detail
- Junctions to dark cladding and joinery
- System
- Resene
- Brought in by
- The homeowner, to finish the build
Render is not timber and it does not behave like it. It is porous, it drinks the first coat unevenly if you let it, and any patch that has been worked back sits differently under a finish than the wall around it. Get the sealing wrong and you see it later as a shadow across a wall that is supposed to read as one flat plane — which on a house designed around large unbroken surfaces is the one thing you cannot have.
The other half of the job is the lines. This house sets white render hard against dark stained cladding and black joinery, with no trim or scotia anywhere to hide behind. Every junction is a straight edge between two colours at maximum contrast, run the full height of the wall, and the eye follows it whether it means to or not. A line that wanders by a millimetre is invisible on a weatherboard villa and obvious here.
So they get cut by hand, and they get cut slowly. Masked where masking helps, freehand where tape would lift a finish that has only just gone off, and checked down the length of the run rather than up close — because a line that looks perfect from a metre away is the only thing anyone will ever see it from.
The homeowner brought us in to help get the build over the line, which is a particular kind of job. You are the last trade on a house that is nearly finished, working around joinery, decking and landscaping that are already done and already someone else's good work. Everything gets covered, everything gets protected, and nothing that was right when we arrived is anything less than right when we leave.