Painters and Decorators in Caterham (CR3)
Caterham's Victorian, Edwardian and interwar houses came with joinery worth keeping — panelled doors, deep skirtings, moulded architrave. A hundred years of repainting tends to bury the detail, and getting it back is the slow part of interior decorating in a house of that age.
What is under the gloss
Every coat that has gone onto a moulding since the house was built has taken a little of its shape away.
The arris rounds off, the quirk in the profile fills, the bead loses its shadow, and eventually a nicely run architrave reads as a soft lump. Getting it back means working the accumulated paint off the mouldings themselves, not flatting the whole face with a sander, then filling joints that have opened and rebuilding a thin, even film. One caution matters in houses of this age: paint from before the 1970s often contains lead, and it remained legally on sale for some purposes long after that, so old coatings are never dry-sanded. They are dealt with wet, or by other methods that keep the dust down.
Doors that no longer shut
In an old house the doors are often the giveaway. Decades of coats build real thickness on the edges and in the rebate, so the door binds on the frame, the latch stops meeting the keep, and the hinges have been packed out with cardboard by whoever last tried to sort it. Painting a door in that state simply locks the problem in for another decade. So it comes off, the accumulated paint is taken off the edges, the hinges and stops are reset, and the door is hung to fit properly before any finish goes near it. That is joinery rather than decorating, and it is done first, because paint on an edge that is still rubbing wears through in months. The joinery and the plaster work behind it are our own team's. Painting is a specialist trade and we treat it as one: brought in, managed by us, priced by us and answered for by us.
The valley streets and the later houses
The town divides between the older settlement up on the plateau and the streets that grew below around the station and Croydon Road, and the joinery follows much the same split.
The post-war houses climbing the valley sides have simpler, plainer profiles, and some will have had doors and skirting replaced with factory-finished joinery at some point. Those need a great deal less stripping and rather more attention to adhesion, because a modern coated surface has to be abraded and primed before paint will hold on it at all. Neither type is harder than the other. They are different jobs, and specifying one as though it were the other is how a quote ends up wrong in both directions.
More in Caterham
Everything we do in Caterham is on the Caterham area sheet, and the full detail of how we approach this trade is on the decorating page.
Common questions
Q.01Should the doors be stripped back or just repainted?
It depends how much detail is left. Where the mouldings are still readable, easing the build-up off them and recoating thinly is enough. Where they have been lost, stripping the door back is worth doing once.
Q.02Is old paint dangerous to sand?
Paint from before the 1970s can contain lead, so it is not dry-sanded. It is dealt with wet or by other methods that keep dust down, and we assume it is there until we know otherwise.
Q.03Will you take the doors off to do them?
For a proper job on an old door, usually yes. It lets the edges be dealt with, the hinges reset and the faces finished flat, and the door goes back shutting the way it should.
Q.04Do you cover both sides of Caterham?
Yes, the hill and the valley. We are based at 27 High Street, Godstone, a few miles down the road, and we were based in Caterham for years before the move.
Thinking about decorating in Caterham?
Tell us what you are planning. We come out, look at the job properly and give you a price for it.