Painter and decorator in West Kirby

Villas, and timber everywhere you look

The older part of West Kirby is Victorian and Edwardian villas running back from the front, and what defines them for a decorator is timber: sash windows, deep bargeboards, fascias, porch detail, gates and often a timber garage. There is far more exterior joinery per house here than on a modern estate, and all of it is on the weather.

Exterior timber is priced per element rather than by area, because a sound bargeboard and a rotten one are different jobs with the same length. The useful thing to establish at the quote is which of yours are which, and that means somebody on a ladder rather than on the drive.

Salt reaches further than the seafront

The estuary and the open sea put salt into the air a long way inland here, and salt does two things to a painted surface. It works into the film and lifts it, and it corrodes any ferrous fixing it can reach, so an old nail head rusts and bleeds a brown stain down a freshly painted board within a season.

That second one is why punching and priming every fixing is in the preparation rather than optional. Skipping it is invisible on the day and obvious by the spring.

Original sashes, and what painting them shut costs you

A lot of these villas still have their original box sash windows. They are worth keeping and they are easy to ruin with a brush: paint run into the meeting rails and the staff bead seals the window shut, and freeing it afterwards takes the paint off with it.

Doing it properly means working the sashes while the paint is still open, which is a slower way to paint a window and the reason a sash is priced differently from a casement. If a quote does not distinguish between the two, it has not looked at your windows.

Inside, high ceilings and original detail

Tall Victorian rooms with run cornice, ceiling roses and picture rails. Cutting in to a cornice that has been painted twenty times is slow, and where the detail has gone soft under the layers the honest options are to leave it, to strip it, or to accept it. All three are legitimate and they should be priced separately rather than assumed.