Interior & Exterior Painting

Paint does not fail because the paint was bad. It fails because it lost its grip on what was underneath it. Every failure mode we get called to fix — peeling, flaking, blistering, a coat that comes away in sheets — traces back to a surface that was dirty, chalky, damp, glossy or already failing when the new coat went on.

That is why the price difference between two quotes for the same house is almost always the prep, not the paint. Washing, scraping back to a sound substrate, sanding gloss to give the next coat something to key into, filling and sanding flat, caulking the gaps that let water in, and spot-priming every patch and every bit of bare wood is slow, unglamorous work that does not photograph well and decides everything.

Exterior paint has two weather requirements, and both are stricter than people expect. It needs the air and the surface above the manufacturer's minimum application temperature — commonly 10°C, with some low-temperature formulations rated lower — and it needs the film to stay dry long enough to cure, which is considerably longer than it takes to stop feeling wet.

Add in that a rain-soaked wall needs days to dry out before it can be painted at all, and the practical exterior season here runs from about April into early October. Everyone books into the same window, so early spring enquiries get the better slots and the more forgiving weather.

Interior work has no such constraint, which is why winter is a genuinely good time to do the inside of the house.

Colour is the decision people agonise over and sheen is the decision that actually changes how a room lives. Flat and matte finishes hide surface imperfection, which is what you want on a ceiling or an older wall, but they are harder to clean. Eggshell and satin are the usual compromise on walls that get touched. Semi-gloss and gloss are for trim, doors and anything that needs scrubbing.

There is a trade-off worth knowing before you pick: the shinier the finish, the more of the wall behind it you can see. A semi-gloss wall in a room with big windows and low winter sun will show every seam, every patch and every ripple in the drywall underneath. If you want that finish, the wall has to be prepared to a higher standard first — which is a drywall decision as much as a paint one.

A whole-home interior quote from us covers the walls, the ceilings, the trim, the doors and the closets unless we've agreed otherwise in writing, and it says so in line items rather than as a single number. Cutting in the line where the wall meets the ceiling, brushing out trim and doors, and doing the hallways and closets is where the hours go — walls themselves are the fast part.

It also covers protecting the house. Floors covered, furniture moved and sheeted, fixtures masked, and the space swept and put back at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job.