Home Improvement Blog

When you decorate the outside of your house you are really doing two jobs: enhancing its appearance and greatly improving its resistance to the elements. If you do the job properly, with careful planning and sound preparation, the finish should last for about five years.

You first task is to decide on a colour scheme. Remember your house should be seen as part of an environment and, in most case, colours should blend with surrounding properties. However, colour conformity is not so important in a street where the houses are of differing architecture – and a row of uniform terraced cottages can be given individuality by dramatic colour contrasts. In general though, unless you have a true fair for colour and design, it is best to choose a more conventional scheme: white, grey or beige are traditional choices for walls; if you want to add a splash of colour, save it for the woodwork which is not too difficult to repaint should you tire of the effect.

Apart from using colour, you can also enhance the appearance of a house by adding timber or plastic cladding, installing new windows and window shutters etc. But be careful: certain forms of improvement which are attractive from the extra protection they offer can detract from the character of the house. Dramatic changes may require planning permission so check with your local planning department before buying materials for new features.

Ideally, exterior decorating should be started and completed between spring and autumn because frost, rain and snow are likely to have a detrimental effect on new paint. On showery days, when it is likely to rain, check wether there is any repair or preparatory work you can do, or any enclosed areas (like a porch) you can paint. Alternatively you could beat the elements by removing a garden gate or side entrance door and painting it indoors or in the garage.

Hot sun is uncomfortable to work in and soon makes you tired. It also causes paint to blister and the glare can make it impossible for you to see which areas have been painted. Always follow the sun; as soon as it has moved, leaving wall in the shade, conditions will be ideal and you should start work in this area.

Windy days also cause problems: stripping paint with a blowtorch becomes difficult since the heat of the flame is dissipated before it can soften the paint. And once you start painting, dust will be blown onto the surface; all you can do is let the paint harden, rub down and start again.

Other factors to be taken into account are your painting skill and working speed and the amount of time available. If both time and skill are limited, it might be wiser to consider a four-year decorating cycle. In the case of a semi-detached house, for example, each of the three elevations could be tackled on a yearly basis with the fourth year left for painting fences or making general repairs. You might prefer to tackle all the walls one year, windows and doors in the second year and gutters and downpipes in the third. In this way the paint work will remain in good condition and you will not a heavy workload at any one time.

Work out how much time you have available and make a plan of operation. First decide how many elevations you will tackle in the first year or wether you prefer to paint only the woodwork, leaving walls to next year, and so on. Then consider the repairs which are needed before you begin decorating and plan to complete these well in advance. If part of a wall has to be re-rendered, you must allow sufficient time for it to dry before painting. Rotten timber might involve considerable remedial work or replacement. Gutters might
need to be repaired or replaced and brickwork repointed.

Estimate the sort of equipment and amount of materials you require. If you need to hire ladders or scaffolds, reserve them well in advance to make sure they will be available when you want them.

When working out your timetable remember, if you are completing the decorating in one year, the walls should be tackled first and the woodwork left until later in the summer when the sun will have dried it out.

Comments are closed.