Do you have a house with tyrolean and it needs painting?
What exactly is tyrolean?
Tyrolean is a sprayed and often coloured mortar or cement mix, which is hand applied with a tool known as a tyrolean gun, or in some cases, a top fed hopper gun powered by a compressor.
Let’s learn a bit more about the system, both the good bits and the bad bits.
Tyrolean wall coatings: what are they?
Before start, let’s clear this up.
We are speaking about a wall coating known as tyrolean.
NOT Terylene, which is a synthetic polyester fibre produced by polymerizing ethylene glycol and terephthelic acid which is obtained from petroleum!
Tyrolean has been used across the world as a cheap, quick, exterior textured wall coating that is normally applied to poor quality surfaces to hide brick or render underneath.
Repairing a tyrolean wall, especially if it is coloured tyrolean, can make the house look very messy as it is almost impossible to get a good match between old and new external wall surfaces.
This is especially true with coloured tyrolean as you will not be able to get a colour match between the old tyrolean and the new tyrolean and therefore the wall, although repaired will have many shades and will look like a patchwork quilt!
The good bits
Tyrolean exterior wall coverings can be a great way to make your home look better, and it’s not just for old houses either. They’re also an effective way to protect your property against the elements.
The exterior walls of most buildings take a battering from the elements over time, whether it’s frost, rain, snow or sun – they all take their toll, leaving the brick or masonry cracked and often covered in algae and mould. This is why many homeowners are turning to rendering for a fresh, new look.
Rendering is a process that involves mixing different components together, then applying the mix to an exterior wall. There are many different types of render, with the most popular ones including stucco and travertine.
Tyrolean is a type of render that hails from the Alpine regions of Austria, strangely enough, the Tyrol region! LOL!
It’s a cement based mixture that has silicone added to it to help it weatherproof your building, in theory anyway.
It’s a popular choice in the UK for both residential and commercial buildings because of its weathered, textured finish. It’s suitable for all kinds of properties, including those that are located in humid environments and/or where there is water nearby.
You can get tyrolean in a variety of colours, but you’ll need to be careful not to choose something too bright. If you’re unsure about which colour to go for, ask experts at your local builders’ merchants to recommend a colour that works well with your exterior walls.
A good way to add colour to tyrolean is to use a mix that has coloured dye mixed in. This means that you can get a more vibrant finish without worrying about the render fading or chipping over time.
However, this method isn’t cheap and you’ll likely have to pay professionals to do the job for you. You’ll also need to be very sure about what you want to do – it can be easy to end up with a paint job that’s not quite right, and it might leave your walls looking unsightly once it’s all over.
Another option is to try to paint over your tyrolean render with a different kind of masonry paint. This can be expensive, but it can also give your home a much more professional-looking finish than simply painting over the original render.
You should note that tyrolean doesn’t always accept paints well, so you might need to try several layers of masonry paint before finding a colour that you like. It can also be difficult to get a smooth finish, so it’s important to work slowly and carefully to ensure an even finish across all the walls.
It’s also a good idea to apply tyrolean in dry conditions, as the rain can easily wash off any coatings you’ve applied. It’s also important to use a protective covering such as a tarpaulin before applying any exterior paints or coatings, so you can avoid problems like peeping holes in your roof or the paint sagging and peeling off the walls later on.
Tyrolean wall painting repair and problems with tyrolean
Tyrolean repairs often are needed when the inflexible wall covering cracks over time as it becomes brittle with age.
Never Paint Again have surveyed many houses with this particular problem and sometimes we find the tyrolean is so brittle it simply falls off when pulled by hand.
This is of course far from ideal, so this is what Never Paint Again does with houses that require repairs to tyrolean.
How to repair tyrolean walls
Never Paint Again can do a full repair to your walls, in some cases, replacing the entire surface coating with a more durable version and then covering the tyrolean with a flexible, spray applied wall coating that does not chip, fade, crack or peel and is guaranteed for 20 years!
Tyrolean covered walls are textured in appearance and Tyrolean is a cement based textured exterior wall coating which is hand applied using a tool called a tyrolean gun.
A tyrolean gun isn’t actually a gun, but is a special bucket with a spindle in the middle which looks rather like a hairbrush.
It is often spelt incorrectly as Terylene, which is in fact a material used in haberdashery and dressmaking!
This is a hand operated tyrolean gun
When a cement mixture is introduced into the tyrolean gun, the handle is turned by the operator which turns the hairbrush-like spiked cylinder, which subsequently picks up the cement mixture, and is then flicked onto the exterior wall surface in small splats.
Tyrolean can have additives too.
The tyrolean mixture sometimes has unibond PVA added to it for better adhesion to the exterior wall. The tool is hand operated and can be very exhausting to use all day!
There are air and electric powered versions available, however nothing beats the old method of doing it and whenever we do a job using this method, we strive to use a mixture of traditional building skills, and modern technology, to create a fantastic and long life transformation of any home, usually within the space of a week!
This is repeated constantly until a desired cement texture is achieved on the wall.
It is very difficult to achieve good results on this method without fine warm weather and a highly skilled operative coating a well prepared wall.
It can be applied as a cement colour or it can be coloured with the addition of an admixture, which is a coloured dye for the water in the mix.
It is brittle, often quite short term, provides no protection against the weather and often finishes patchy.
Traditional tyrolean exterior wall surfaces often crack and in many cases, as the tyrolean wall coating applied is so thin and brittle, it falls off.
We mean Literally: falls off.
Our painting teams remove all unsound and suspect tyrolean, and replaces the surface to match, before applying a cement bonding mixture, a coat of water resistant paint primer, and then we spray apply our exterior wall coating to the wall.
If you have a tyrolean coated house and require a maintenance free exterior wall finish then here’s what you do. Call us now on 0800 970 4928