Renovation Repaint and Exterior Joinery — Chester Place, Taradale

This Taradale home had been through a full renovation. The owners had taken the house right apart and rebuilt it, so by the time we arrived there was brand-new work sitting alongside the original everywhere you looked, and the whole lot had to come together as one finish. We took care of the interior, from the plastering through to the final coat, then came back to do the exterior timber joinery.

Plastering and painting under the one crew

On a renovation the plastering and the painting are usually two different trades. Here they were the same one. We did the stopping and the hole filling ourselves and then painted over our own work, so there was no handover in the middle of the job and nobody left arguing about whose fault a visible joint was.

That counts for a lot on a house that's been stripped back and rebuilt, because new linings meet original surfaces all through it and every one of those junctions has to disappear once the paint is on. Once the walls were right we worked through the whole interior: the walls first, then the skirtings, scotias and architraves. The trim is the part people run their eye along, so it gets the time it needs.

Wooden windows and French doors

Exterior timber joinery is its own job. Wooden windows and French doors sit out in the weather on every elevation, they move with the seasons, and they take far more prep per square metre than any wall on the house does. Get the prep wrong and it shows up within a couple of summers.

We took on all the exterior joinery here, every wooden window and the French doors, and the windows were re-puttied as part of it. A lot of painters won't put re-puttying in a quote at all. We do, because sound putty is what keeps water out of the timber, and once water is in, paint won't save it. The order matters as much as the work: prime it, putty it, prime it again, then topcoat. Timber also wants a different system to the rest of a house, and getting that call right is most of the battle.

Renovating in Taradale, or anywhere across Hawke's Bay, and got joinery that needs bringing back to life? Give us a call and we'll come and have a look.