Greater Bendigo · Castlemaine · Maryborough
Over 30 years' experience0497 560 949
Exterior house painting across Greater Bendigo, including the repair work that has to happen before any of it goes on.
Outside, paint has two jobs at once. It sets how the house looks from the street, and it is the layer keeping the weather off everything underneath. The second job is the one that fails first, and it usually fails out of sight.
So a repaint here starts with what is under the old coat rather than with what is going over it. Where a surface has gone, it gets dealt with before anything is painted.
Exterior work is one half of what we do as house painters in Bendigo; the inside of the house is the other.
Before any paint
Weatherboards take the worst of the weather on any house. Sun on one elevation, driving rain on another, and on an older place a century of both.
Boards give way at the bottom edge and at the ends first, which is exactly where nobody is looking. Paint needs something sound to grip, and a failed board is not sound: it keeps moving, keeps taking up water and keeps breaking down underneath whatever is put on top of it.
The new paint then lifts along that one board while the rest of the wall still looks perfectly good, which is the giveaway that the surface was the problem all along. The job looked finished and lasted a season or two.
That is why repairing an exterior and replacing weatherboards where they need it comes first on our jobs, rather than being work you have to organise separately. Which boards can be saved and which have to come out is part of working out the job, and a replacement is made good so the wall reads as one surface again instead of as a patch.
A board that has gone soft or split will not hold a coating.
A wall we know needs work is a scheduling question and nothing worse. The same wall found once the scaffolding is up is a far less comfortable conversation. The more that is understood about the state of the boards up front, the closer the quote lands to the job you actually get.
Not every older house needs board work, and the ones that do rarely need it everywhere. One elevation can be entirely sound while the side that faces the weather has had enough.
Case study
The photographs here are from an 1800s weatherboard home we repainted. The old cream coat came back to bare timber along the walls, the repairs went in, and the house went back on in white with its brick chimney left as it was.
An older house is where preparation stops being a talking point and becomes most of the work. There was no version of this job that started with opening a tin.
Optional: if you want this shown, I need you to confirm which suburb or town this job was in.Optional: if you want this shown, I need you to confirm two or three sentences about this job, in your own words.
Before1 / 6Front of a single-storey weatherboard and rendered-block cottage in faded cream paint, with scaffolding along the wall and a taped sheet of builder's wrap covering a patched section beside the downpipe.
New work outside
New exterior work starts somewhere else entirely.
The cladding has never been coated, the frames and trim are all clean edges, and the finish has to sit with whatever has already been chosen for the rest of the build.
The extension below went from unpainted sheet cladding, through undercoat with the black cut in around the windows, to a finished charcoal wall under a steel roof. It joins onto an existing cream brick house, and that junction is the part that has to look deliberate rather than tacked on.
We paint brand new homes, renovations and extensions outside as well as in, so a house being added to does not need two sets of painters to end up matching.
Exterior preparation
Exterior surfaces arrive with a history. Preparation outside is largely the work of undoing that before adding anything to it.
Sun has chalked one wall, water has been working in under a sill on another, and somewhere on most houses there is a patch that was coated over rather than repaired.
Nothing outside gets painted until it has been fixed, primed and prepared. On an older home that accounts for most of the days on site; on a new one it goes faster, but it is not the step that gets dropped to make up time.
A prepared wall still has to be dry and the weather still has to hold, so exterior work follows the forecast rather than the diary. Losing a day to rain is cheaper than painting the same wall twice.
Common questions
Not covered here?
Ring us and ask. It is the quickest way to get a straight answer about your own place.
Yes. Repairing an exterior and replacing weatherboards where they need it, before any paint goes on, is a normal part of what we do — not an extra we send you elsewhere for.
It matters because paint only lasts as long as the surface underneath it. Coating a board that has already gone is a short-term result at best.
Yes. One of the projects we are proudest of is an 1800s weatherboard house brought back to life — repaired, prepared and repainted rather than simply coated over.
Older homes usually need more preparation than new ones, and that is where the difference between a finish that lasts and one that does not is decided.
Dry, mild conditions suit exterior painting best. Paint needs a dry surface to go onto and reasonable conditions to cure in, so heavy rain, heavy dew and extremes of heat or cold all work against a good finish.
In practice that means we schedule exterior work around the weather rather than around the calendar. If conditions are not right on the day, waiting is the cheaper option.
Because paint is only as durable as the surface beneath it. A coating applied over a surface that is damaged, loose or dirty will fail from underneath, however good the paint is and however neatly it goes on.
We make sure everything is fixed, primed and well prepared on every surface before the painting starts. It is the least visible part of the job on the day it is finished, and the part you notice most in five years.
Related
The inside of the house: walls, ceilings, doors and trim, in homes being lived in and in new builds.
An overview of everything we paint, inside and out, and how a job runs from quote to completion.
Tell us about the house — the boards, the trim, how long since it was last painted — and what you would like done with it.
Give us a ring, or send through what the outside of the house needs and we will get straight back to you.
Talk to us
0497 560 949Located in Bendigo, servicing the Greater Bendigo region, Maryborough, Castlemaine and surrounding areas. Give us a call to see if we can come to you.
