Removing external render

[ChocolateRicecake]

Just wondering if anyone who's been in a similar situation can advise: We have a Victorian house which has been part-covered in textured paint/render at some point in the past (looks like that Tyrolean stuff). Other areas are just painted brick. It looks horrible, is cracking/peeling in many places and is a concern with regards to damp.

Ideally we'd remove it all and restore the brick facing. As we have no idea why it was done (aesthetics??!!) we don't know what condition the bricks are in and whether they would survive removal.

Is this something only a specialist company should be doing? Very expensive?

I was thinking of buying a victorian terrace house with god-awful red painted pebble dash and looked into costs of removal and sorting out the underlying brickwork.

I did manage to find a few old thread (I think on here!) about the costs and what is involved and that there are a few (very in demand) people that do it in London.

The general theme was that it was quite expensive (absolute min £5k) and that there might be lots of section of bricks that had to be replaces and probably be totally repointed.

We just had ours done. Victorian semi, in the 1980s some fucker half rendered it and then subsequently the lower half was painted.

The paint was acid washed off easily enough, though the splashes damaged my new painted front door grrr and it also dampened the electrics which went haywire for a few days till they dried out.

The render was chipped off but it had completely ruined the bricks underneath. They had been scoured to provide a good grip. The specialist told me with render you have about a 10 percent chance of getting it off cleanly, and it depend on when it was done; the more recently the worse as they stick it on more thoroughly. We had to have our whole front re rendered - it was that or rebuild the whole outer skin of bricks.

The render looks loads better as it is much less bumpy than the old stuff; we used k-rend which has colour mixed in so it won't need repainting and it looks crisp and clean. But I'm still sad we couldn't restore the brick 🙁
I think the render was about 3-5k for our frontage (tall Victorian semi). Hard to be certain off the top of my head as it was part of a larger project.

Thanks for early replies, I will have a better search.

No doubt it will be expensive, but even if it needs to be taken off only to be re-rendered properly (which will be a massive shame as the neighbours still have bare brick which looks lovely), it does need sorting.

We have a lovely Victorian detatched house which was completely covered in pebbledash (probably why no one wanted to buy it!). We had a specialist company quote and it was around £7k+ just to remove the front, probably over £30k to do the whole house. In the end we got a local builder to do it for £7k (the whole house). A lot of the brick fronts came off, it all needed repointing but it looks a thousand times better now. DH then treated it all with a waterproofing product. No regrets at all!