Painter and decorator in Hoylake

The weather, and what it does to a coating

Hoylake takes wind driven rain straight off the Irish Sea with nothing between. Rain arriving horizontally finds any opening in a coating: a hairline crack, a failed joint, the gap where a pipe bracket goes through. Once water is behind a paint film it cannot get out through it, so it pushes the film off from the inside.

That is why paint here fails in sheets rather than flakes, and why repainting over it is the most expensive thing you can do: you pay twice and the second coat fails faster than the first.

North elevations, algae, and treating rather than covering

A north facing wall here never properly dries between one weather front and the next, and what grows on it is algae: the green and black film that comes back every autumn. Painting over it buries living growth under a new coat, where it keeps going and lifts the film.

It has to be killed and washed off, and the wall has to be dry before anything goes on. That is a real part of the programme on this coast and a quote that does not mention it has not allowed for it. For the washing itself we would point you at wirralexteriorcleaning.com rather than quote for work that is not ours.

Through coloured render, and when painting is the wrong answer

A number of houses here have had a through coloured render system put on precisely so there is no paint film to fail. If that is what you have, painting it is usually a step backwards: you are adding the layer the system was bought to avoid.

So the first question on a Hoylake exterior is what is actually on the wall. Painted sand and cement is a repaint. A through coloured system is a clean and inspect, and we will say so rather than sell you a coat it does not want.

Inside, Edwardian rooms and a lot of woodwork

The terraces nearer the station and the bigger houses by the links are Edwardian inside: tall rooms, panel doors, deep skirtings and picture rails, usually under a lot of accumulated paint. Preparation is the job and the finish coat is the easy part.