Decorating across the Teesside conurbation
Our decorators work out of Middlesbrough TS3 and cover the whole conurbation: Middlesbrough and Stockton, Thornaby, Billingham and Norton, Yarm and Eaglescliffe, Redcar, Marske, Saltburn and Guisborough, and Hartlepool to the north. The search that brings most people here is painter and decorator Teesside, and it returns firms who will all happily paint a wall. Choosing between them is mostly a question of who understands what sits under the existing paint, because the housing here spans a century and a half of different wall build-ups.
A Linthorpe villa on original lime plaster, a 1950s Billingham semi with a textured ceiling, and a 1990s Ingleby Barwick house with shrinkage cracks are three genuinely different jobs that look identical in a photograph. That is why we quote after seeing the rooms. A price offered without looking is either padded for the worst case or destined to grow once the wallpaper comes off.
Preparation is the job, and paint is the last part of it
On most jobs, preparation is the majority of the labour and the whole of the quality. Filling, caulking, sanding, sealing, stain blocking and taking failed gloss back to something sound are what the finish is actually made of. On woodwork in property painted before the 1990s that preparation is also a health question rather than a finish one: old gloss can be lead-based, and the HSE's guidance on lead is why we do not dry-sand it. The paint is the visible hour at the end.
That is also where a quote goes right or wrong. Two rooms of the same size can differ by days once one of them has three layers of paper bonded to soft plaster and the other does not.
| Stage | What it covers | What makes it longer |
|---|---|---|
| Strip and clear | Wallpaper, tile adhesive, flaking coatings, protecting floors and furniture | Layer count, and whether the paper has bonded to the plaster |
| Repair | Filling, patching, caulking gaps, easing and refitting loose trim | How much of it is filler work and how much is really plastering |
| Seal | Mist coats on bare plaster, stabilising chalky walls, stain blocking | New plaster, previous water damage, nicotine, and heavy colour changes |
| Woodwork prep | Taking off failed gloss, knotting, priming, undercoat | Whether the existing paint is sound or letting go |
| Coating | Cutting in and rolling, normally two coats | Colour change, and how much the surface drinks the first coat |
| Access | Ladders, towers or scaffold outside, stairwell access inside | Height and ground conditions, not wall area |
Plaster and skimming, and when filling stops being honest
Some walls need a plasterer rather than a decorator, and the difference is worth knowing before you accept anyone's quote. Plaster that sounds hollow when you tap it has blown from the wall behind and will not hold a repair. A crack that returns in the same line every year is movement, so filling it again just buys another year.
We say which one you have, including when filling genuinely is enough. Because plastering sits inside the same team, a re-skim does not mean finding a second firm and waiting for their diary. It does mean waiting for the plaster itself. Fresh plaster has to dry before it takes a mist coat, and how long that takes depends on the room, the season and the ventilation rather than on anyone's schedule.
Textured ceilings, and the caution on anything pre-2000
Artex and similar textured coatings went onto a very large number of Teesside ceilings in the 1970s and 80s, and plenty of them are still up there. There are three honest options.
| Option | What you get | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Overcoat | The texture stays, the ceiling looks fresh | Least, and quickest |
| Skim over it | A flat modern ceiling, nothing removed | More, plus drying time before decorating |
| Leave it | Nothing changes | Nothing now |
The option that is not on the list is taking it off yourself with a scraper or a sander. Textured coatings applied before the year 2000 can contain asbestos. Removing one is not licensed work under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, which is part of why it gets treated so casually, but the HSE's asbestos guidance is clear that it still has to be done by someone trained and competent using controlled methods. Dry scraping and sanding are never among them. If nobody knows the age of the ceiling, it gets tested. This comes up constantly in the post-war stock, which is why it is dealt with at length on the Billingham decorating page.
Damp, stains and what paint cannot do
Stain block covers a mark. It does not cover a cause. Blocking an old ceiling stain after a leak has been repaired and the plaster has dried out is proper decorating practice. Blocking one while water is still arriving is a way of paying for the same ceiling twice.
The usual causes we find behind a returning patch are a live plumbing leak, a blocked or split gutter running down a wall, failed pointing or render on an exposed elevation, and condensation that is really a ventilation problem. Each has a different fix and none of them is paint — the government's guidance on damp and mould for rented housing is worth reading before anyone reaches for stain block in a let property. Where it turns out to be pipework, our own plumbers are in the same firm, which at least means the decorator knows exactly how much water went where and how long it needs before anything is sealed.
Older solid-walled property adds one more consideration. Where a wall was built to breathe, and there is plenty of that stock in Old Billingham, the Hartlepool Headland and around Yarm, sealing it with a modern impermeable coating can create a damp problem that was never there before. The coating has to suit the wall, not just the colour chart.
Woodwork, and why it takes longer than the walls
Woodwork is the slow part of nearly every interior job. Failed gloss has to come off rather than be painted over, and then the sequence is knotting, priming, undercoat and topcoats, with drying time between each one that cannot be compressed by working harder.
It also explains why period property costs more than its floor plan suggests. The tall terraces in Saltburn, the Victorian stock in Linthorpe and the older houses around Norton Green carry picture rails, dado rails, deep skirtings, panelled doors and sash windows. That is several times the linear metres of a modern estate house with flat doors and a plain skirting. Outside, joinery comes with the added question of rot, which is cut out and repaired before anything is primed, or replaced by our property maintenance team where it has gone too far to save.
Void properties and between-tenancy work
An empty property is the cheapest time to decorate and the easiest time to get the sequence right. Decoration is the last trade through, after any plumbing, electrical or plaster repairs, which is the only order that does not involve somebody making good someone else's damage on a day nobody budgeted for.
For letting work we use durable finishes rather than the cheapest tin, and scuff-resistant paint in halls and stairwells where the damage actually happens. Decoration is not itself a landlord repairing duty, but the things that ruin it usually are. Photographs go on the record at completion, and the invoice matches the quote. Landlords with several properties of the same house type, which is common across the estates in Billingham, Thornaby and Redcar, usually get a better price by having them specified once and batched rather than booked one at a time. The between-tenancy checklist sets out what else is worth doing while the keys are back.
Outside work, and the weather that decides it
Exterior decorating on Teesside has a season, roughly late spring to early autumn. Masonry coatings and exterior wood finishes need a dry surface and a temperature above the manufacturer's minimum while they cure, not just while they are applied, and on a solid-walled pre-1919 terrace what you put on the outside affects how the wall dries — Historic England's advice on older buildings covers why that matters more than the colour does, and a coating put onto a cold damp wall fails after you have paid for it.
The coast changes the cycle as well as the season. Seaward elevations at Redcar, Marske, Saltburn, Seaton Carew and the Headland take salt-laden wind that inland houses never see, so one face of the building tires long before the others. Pricing every elevation on the same cycle is why coastal houses so often have three sides that look fine and one that does not. The Redcar and Saltburn pages go into that, and the Middlesbrough page covers the inland stock. Finished jobs are on our work pages.
What we will not do
We will not paint over damp while the cause is still live. We will not scrape or sand a textured coating of unknown age. We will not quote a full house from photographs, because the photograph never shows the thing that decides the price.
We will also not cut the preparation to match a cheaper quote. If someone has come in lower, ask them what preparation is included and compare that rather than the total, because that is almost always where the difference sits. And if a single small room is wanted tomorrow, a one-man decorator will usually get to you sooner than we will. Our value is on jobs where the decorating is tangled up with plaster, plumbing or a deadline.
Getting a price
Someone comes and looks at the actual rooms. You get a fixed written price covering a scope that names the preparation instead of leaving it implied, and it is yours to read, keep and accept online. There is no call-out fee on quoted work, and anything the job turns out to need beyond that quote is agreed with you before we do it. Tell us what you already know when you get in touch: previous leaks, cracks that keep coming back, paper that predates you. It all changes the number, and it belongs in the quote rather than in a conversation on the second morning.
