Summer St painting
We were already on the street, painting the exterior next door. That is how this one came about — the tenants watched the finish going up over the boundary and asked whether theirs could be made to look like that. At the time it could not have looked less like it. Working with the property manager we booked in a suitable time.
- Scope
- Exterior fencing
- Condition
- Heavily damaged, rust bleeding from every screw head
- Preparation
- Pressure wash, scrape and sand back
- Priming
- Metal primer to the screw heads, full oil-based sealer
- System
- 2 top coats
- Finish
- Semi-gloss
The house is modern and sits in the heart of Ponsonby, and the fence was the one part of the property letting it down. It was heavily damaged. Paint lifting away and flaking in most places, weathered back to grey in others, and rust bleeding out of every screw head and running down the face of the boards.
We started with a pressure wash to strip off the dirt and everything loose, then scraped back all the failed paint. On a fence in this condition that is most of a day on its own. The scraping and sanding is the part nobody sees and the part that decides how the finish sits.
Then the screw heads — every one of them spot-primed with a metal primer before anything else went near them. Skip that step and the rust comes back through the topcoat inside a season no matter how good the paint above it is, and you end up with a row of orange freckles down a brand-new fence.
A full oil-based sealer went over the timber next, across bare and sound areas alike, so the whole fence entered the topcoats as one surface instead of a patchwork of old and new. Then two top coats in semi-gloss.
The brief was a finish that would stand out. Semi-gloss is unforgiving — it picks up every flat spot and every bit of prep you didn't do. Done properly it comes up like glass. On Summer St, it does.