Heritage home painting
This one sat a few hundred metres from the water and it had the paint history to prove it — a villa from 1903 carrying a century of coats, the earliest of them oil-based and long past flexing with the timber underneath.
- Built
- 1903
- Scope
- Full exterior strip and repaint
- Substrate
- Weatherboard, joinery, soffits
- Preparation
- Stripped to bare timber, lead tested first
- Repairs
- Soft board ends, scotia splits, window reveals
- Exposure
- Coastal
The owners had had it recoated before. It blistered again inside a couple of years. That is almost never a paint fault. On a coastal site, airborne salt settles into the surface and stays there, and anything applied over it never properly bonds — moisture draws through the film toward the salt underneath and lifts the coating off from behind. Recoating over that buys you eighteen months.
So the exterior came back to bare timber. Weatherboards, joinery, soffits, the lot — stripped, not sanded down and hoped for. The house predates 1980, so the old coatings were tested for lead first and taken off under containment, which is standard on anything this age and part of our restoration painting service.
What the strip exposed was the real job: a few boards gone soft at the ends, splits in the scotia, and decades of filler in the window reveals that had stopped moving with the joinery. All of it made good before a drop of paint went on. Using our 9-step process we completed this full restoration, bringing this villa back to its original beauty.
The brief was a high-quality finish. On a house this age that is decided almost entirely before the topcoat goes on — in the strip, in the repairs, and in what you seal the bare timber with. Clean lines at the cut-in, nothing telegraphing through the boards, and a film that will still be doing its job in eight years rather than three.