Painters & Decorators in Marton, Middlesbrough

Painting and decorating in Marton

Decorating in Marton is mostly a question of what is behind the paint. In the 1930s semis around Tollesby and the older streets, the walls downstairs have usually been re-skimmed at some point but the ceilings upstairs are often still lath and plaster, and the joinery has picture rails, panelled doors and deep skirtings under many decades of coatings. In the 1960s and 1970s houses around Marton Manor the substrate is plasterboard and skim, and the legacy is different: textured ceilings, woodchip, and the occasional wall that was papered rather than made good.

Neither is difficult work. Both punish anyone who treats preparation as the part of the job you compress when the week gets tight.

The short version

Interiors, exteriors, papering and making good. Preparation is most of the work and most of the quote. Textured coatings are identified before they are touched, and lath ceilings are repaired as lath ceilings rather than filled and hoped over.

Where the time actually goes

What Marton houses throw up

Lath and plaster upstairs. The defining interior issue in the older housing. Lath ceilings crack along the laths, sag where the key behind has broken, and sound hollow when tapped. A decorator filling those cracks year after year is treating the symptom. The honest assessment is how much of the ceiling has actually lost its key, and that decides whether it is a repair or a board-and-skim, which is a bigger job we would rather quote once than disguise as decorating three times.

Joinery carrying too many coats. Original doors, rails and skirtings in these houses often hold eight decades of paint, with runs, brush marks and filled damage under the top coat. Rubbing down properly is slow and it is the entire difference between joinery that looks refinished and joinery that looks repainted. Where the build-up is severe on a door worth keeping, taking it back is sometimes the right recommendation even though it costs more.

Textured coatings from the 1970s and 1980s. Widespread on the Marton Manor housing. Anything applied before 2000 may contain asbestos and should be tested before it is disturbed. That is a safety point rather than a sales one, and it is why we will not scrape a textured ceiling of unknown age on the first morning to save a day.

Shaded elevations under mature trees. The older Marton streets are leafy, and a north-facing wall that never gets sun stays damp, grows algae and takes a coating differently from the sunny side of the same house. Treating both elevations identically is why one of them always fails first.

Painted render on the semis. A lot of these houses have rendered or pebbledashed elevations that have been coated repeatedly. The wall needs to release moisture, and a heavy impermeable coating over a wall that cannot dry pushes itself off in sheets a couple of winters later. Finding out why a wall is wet comes before deciding what to put on it.

Exterior work and the weather window

Exterior decorating is dictated by the weather rather than the diary, and on Teesside that gives a usable season rather than a year-round option. Coatings need surfaces that are genuinely dry and temperatures that hold overnight, not just at two in the afternoon, so an exterior booked for late in the year is a job we will be honest with you about rather than start and abandon.

What we look at first is the timber. On the older Marton village and Tollesby houses the fascias, soffits and window bottoms are where decay starts, and paint over soft timber is money spent on hiding a repair that still needs doing. On the Marton Manor housing the equivalent is the render and the garage surround. We flag what needs cutting out and making good at the quote stage, because it changes the price and it is not something anybody wants discovered from a ladder on the second morning.

When we are the wrong choice

If you want one coat over a wall that needs filling, or a textured ceiling scraped off without anybody establishing what it is made of, we are not the right firm. We will not paint a stairwell from a ladder balanced on a step because it is quicker, and we will not put a sealing coating on a wall that we can see is holding water, however clearly it has been asked for.

How the job runs

We look at the rooms, agree the scope and the finish, and quote in writing. Furniture is moved and sheeted, floors covered and edges masked before a tin is opened. Preparation is done first and properly, then coats go on with the drying time they need rather than the drying time the programme wants. We tidy each evening and leave the labelled tins with you.

Decorating is usually the last trade in, so where it follows a bathroom or a kitchen it is quoted in the same document and sequenced after them rather than around them. Finished work is on the our work pages, and a list of rooms sent through the contact form is enough for us to tell you what we would want to look at. We decorate across the rest of Middlesbrough as well, where the older stock brings its own preparation problems.