Grey Lynn renovation painting
We came onto this one through the builder. He had a villa on Richmond Road stripped back to the frame — old walls out, new walls in, ceilings reworked — and we came in behind him as the surfaces went up.
- Scope
- Full interior, villa renovation
- Substrate
- New plasterboard against original villa timber
- Ceilings
- Battened, cut in by hand
- Detail
- Original scotia and skirting profiles
- Joinery
- Villa windows, small panes and thin bars
- Alongside
- The builder's programme
A renovation is a different job to a repaint. Nothing is settled yet. You are working new plasterboard against hundred-year-old timber, and the two don't behave the same way, don't take a coat the same way, and won't sit flush with each other unless somebody makes them.
The ceilings ran battens across them, which meant every batten had two long edges and two junctions to cut in by hand, the full length of every room. Then the scotia and the skirting, both original villa profiles and both deeply detailed — enough shape in them that a roller is no use and a brush is the only way through. Villa windows throughout, all of them old school, small panes and thin bars.
There is no fast version of any of that. What there is instead is prep. Filling, sanding, checking, sanding again, and getting the surface right before the first coat rather than hoping the last one covers for it. On a house like this the detail is the entire point — it is why the owners kept the villa instead of levelling it — and detail only reads properly if what sits underneath it is true.
Working in behind a builder means working to his sequence too. Surfaces come available in the order the build allows, not the order that suits painting — so you prime what is ready, protect what isn't, and come back through it again once the next stage is off the floor.
Everything specified was top of the line, and the brief coming from the builder was the same one we work to: quality first, and the programme fits around it.