Skimming Costs in Essex: What a Room Really Costs

What you are actually paying for

A skim is a thin finishing coat, usually around 2 to 3mm of multi finish plaster, applied over a sound surface to give you a flat, paintable wall. It is not the same as re-plastering. If the old plaster is blown, hollow or crumbling, it has to come off and the wall needs a backing coat first, and that is a different job with a different price.

Most of the cost is labour and time, not materials. A bag of multi finish is only around £10 to £14, and a sheet of plasterboard around £10 to £16. What you are paying for is the days on site, the preparation, the protection of your floors and the skill of getting a flat finish that does not show up under a low winter sun through the window.

Realistic price ranges for an Essex room

Working on a supply and fit basis, with the room emptied and ready, these are the sorts of figures you would expect around Chelmsford, Springfield, Great Baddow and the surrounding villages. Treat them as starting points, not fixed prices.

Prices in Essex generally sit a little below central London rates but above much of the East of England, largely because of travel and parking. Jobs inside the city centre or in tight terraced streets can carry a small uplift where there is nowhere to unload.

• Ceiling only, small bedroom (around 3m x 3m): roughly £180 to £300
• Walls and ceiling, box room or small bedroom: roughly £400 to £600
• Walls and ceiling, average double bedroom (3.5m x 4m): roughly £550 to £850
• Walls and ceiling, lounge or through lounge: roughly £800 to £1,400
• Overboarding an artexed or uneven ceiling before skimming: add roughly £150 to £350 per ceiling
• Hallway, stairs and landing: often quoted separately at £700 to £1,300 because of the scaffolding and access time

The things that push the price up

Ceilings cost more per square metre than walls. They are slower, harder on the body and usually need two people, so a room with a difficult ceiling will always quote higher than the floor area suggests.

Artex is the big variable in Essex housing stock. Plenty of properties built between the 1960s and the mid 1980s have textured ceilings, and anything from that era may contain asbestos in the coating. A responsible plasterer will not sand it. The usual answer is to overboard it, which is safer, quicker and gives a better finish than trying to flatten it.

Old lath and plaster, common in the older cottages around the Essex villages, is another one. It can look fine and still be loose behind, and it often makes more sense to strip and board than to skim over and hope.

How quotes are built, and what to ask

Many plasterers in the area work to a day rate of roughly £180 to £250 per person per day, then price the job by how many days it will take plus materials and waste disposal. That is why a quote for a room is really an estimate of time. If someone quotes far below everyone else, the honest question is which day has been left out: the preparation, the second coat or the making good.

Ask what is included before you compare figures. Removing old coving, filling deep chases from rewiring, taking off radiators, taping joints and bagging up rubble are all real hours, and they are the bits most often assumed rather than stated.

Timings and living with the job

A single bedroom, walls and ceiling, is typically one to two days on site. A lounge is usually two to three. Overboarding adds most of a day per ceiling.

New plaster needs time before it is painted. Allow four to seven days for a skim over existing plaster in a warm, ventilated room, and up to two to three weeks where a backing coat has gone on. It should be a consistent pale colour all over with no dark patches before you touch it. The first coat should be a watered down mist coat of matt emulsion, roughly three parts paint to one part water, or the topcoat will peel.