Decorating advice for Landlords and Property Management Agents
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Decorating advice for Landlords and Property Management Agents

Landlords and Property Management Agents sometimes ask our advice for maintaining paintwork in apartment blocks. This includes in-between tenancy commercial decorating as well as regular cyclical maintenance of common spaces and exteriors, as well as Section 20 and JCT decorating work. Durability We’d always recommend focusing on practical and durable finishes, whether the buildings are for…

Is it worth paying more for Farrow & Ball?
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Is it worth paying more for Farrow & Ball?

It’s a question that comes up frequently. With Farrow & Ball paints often costing twice or three times as much as comparable Deluxe and Crown paints – both good quality brands – is it really worth paying the extra? Will you be able to tell the difference? From a professional decorator’s viewpoint, here’s what I…

Choosing white paint – simple, surely?
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Choosing white paint – simple, surely?

Recently we’ve seen some customers getting very creative with their use of different shades of white and it got me thinking. Always dangerous. It won’t surprise you to hear that white is the most popular paint colour. But white comes in a wide range of shades – even “Pure Brilliant White” can vary considerably between manufacturers. Here’s…

Redecorating boosts your house value – but what colours sell best?
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Redecorating boosts your house value – but what colours sell best?

When I was just a lad, I convinced my Dad to let me decorate my own room. Today, as my bank account waves farewell to yet another mortgage payment, I spare my Dad a thought as I think what the orange wallpaper and purple paint did to the value of the family home. Regular readers…

A useful tool for surveyors and architects
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A useful tool for surveyors and architects

Dulux have had a tablet or phone-based colour-picking app, aimed at home users, for some time. It’s quite handy – some people love it, others find it a bit gimmicky – but it does tend to make you think about diffferent colour combinations. Now they have a comparable app for professionals. Architects, designers and specifiers…

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Resources for choosing paint colours

There’s nothing as individual as choosing colours. You can get endless advice on the internet, not to mention friends and relatives. You might even appreciate some of it. As decorators we’ve learned to be careful about offering opinions – but it’s nice to know what is possible and what’s out there. Here are  links to the…

How to clean paintwork – a useful email, at last
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How to clean paintwork – a useful email, at last

I promised you a useful email, and at last here it is. We only deal with a better class of client, and we know you will want to treat our beautiful paintwork with the love it deserves after we have packed up and gone home. But accidents happen. In the photo above some child prodigy has…

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It’s officially (nearly) spring. What colours are we picking this year?

Sky-high house prices in London are resulting in a lot more home improvements. And we’re always happy to help. I happened to be looking at some old paint charts and thought it was interesting how much they reflect the times. The 1970’s look very strange –  here’s the Dulux catalogue from 1975: And this shows the…

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What goes into your housepaint?

Feel a touch of Spring in the air? Just the tiniest whiff? As we move ever closer to Spring-cleaning time, a fresh crop of Dulux and Farrow & Ball colour charts have started to poke their heads though the snow. But since most of us spend our lives entirely surrounded by paint (yes, it’s everywhere…

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Decorators tips: How to hang your Christmas decorations.

Lesson One: hanging on brick walls Planning to decorate the house this year? Perhaps you like the understated elegance of this example? Even if you’re not so brave, I thought you might like a decorator’s tips on how to make decorations stay up without incurring a repair bill in the New Year, so here are some…

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Decorating tips – and some new words

As I drive around London in my van I have to think about something. So what about this: Is there a collective noun for decorators? I sometimes use old-fashioned anglo-saxon words to talk about my workmen, but really they are warm and cuddly people. They deserve a proper collective noun, one that isn’t a swear-word….

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To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail

The quotation above is one of my favourites from Mark Twain. Working in the decorating industry, I see a lot of men with hammers. They’ll hit anything. So when salesmen urged half of London to replace old wooden doors with UPVC, they weren’t necessarily just thinking about the commission. I’m sure many of them genuinely believed in…

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What to watch out for after all this rain

All this rain is causing damp problems to homes all over London, even in areas which have avoided flooding. 
I hope you’ve not had any serious damage, but I thought you might want to know the main things to watch out for.

Water can get into walls through various ways, including: Cracked or missing roof tiles Gaps around door and window frames Breaks in…

What you didn’t know about paint colours
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What you didn’t know about paint colours

I’m becoming an expert at boring people at parties. If you invited me round this Christmas, you’d probably regret it. It’s not as if I wander around Fulham watching paint dry, but my wife thinks I’ve been learning more about paint this year than is healthy. Take colours. There are two ways to pick your colours…

Restoring old paint finishes and choice of paint for exteriors
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Restoring old paint finishes and choice of paint for exteriors

Sales of green paint have been going well since my last newsletter (in case you missed it, it’s supposed to be the paint equivalent of viagra). But I thought I should raise the tone a little. We sometimes find houses with old paint finishes that haven’t been redecorated since the 70’s, and often enough we…

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And the best colour to paint your room for a sexy time is …

Everyone knows the story about painting the Forth Road Bridge (by the time the painters reach one end they have to start again at the beginning). Here’s something I didn’t know: the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is painted in ‘International Orange’, but the US Navy originally wanted it in yellow and black stripes,…

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How to tell if it’s time for repainting

Here in the South we seem to be moving towards Spring, despite the pictures I saw of cars in Yorkshire stranded in the snow.
It’s a good time of year to take stock of a home and look at what jobs will need to be done, including decorating jobs of course.

External paintwork
What should you look for…

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Avoiding home damage from the cold

This kind of weather makes people worry about everything from burst pipes to collapsing roofs. It also makes my workmen fight over who gets to work in the warmest houses. But there are points to watch out for in a cold snap that could save nasty bills later, so I thought I’d pass on what…