We completelhy renovated our house after buying it two years ago, including rendering, replacing window frames and re-painting the roof tiles. We used to have red brick, cream window frames and an orange roof - very 1980s and very unattractive! We now have dark blue/grey window frames and roof and a mock limestone render. It looks absolutely fantastic and is so worth the money. It took very little time to do - I think it was only a couple of days all up for our 380m2 house and cost $11K. That would have been about 18 months ago. We recently had the guys back to render the court yard wall we built and front wall and the prices were still the same. I had organised three quotes to be done, and just happened to have asked for a quote of the company that does all the rendering work under the umbrella of a big company. It was significantly cheaper to do it "direct" through him than via the big company so its definitely worth checking out the smaller guys. He uses the same product and offers the same guarantee for both work.

I'm not sure that it will date the house given that rendering has now been a very popular choice since the late 1990s and continuing, but I know the red brick and orange tiles certainly dated it.