Painters and Decorators in Horley (RH6)
Horley carries a lot of modern housing — the family homes around Langshott and The Acres, and newer streets spreading out towards Gatwick. A house from the 1990s or 2000s decorates very differently from a Victorian one, and it brings its own set of problems rather than none at all.
What a newer house is actually finished with
Most modern walls are plasterboard with a thin skim over them, and most are handed over in a contract emulsion chosen because it covers quickly and costs little.
It is porous, it marks if you brush past it with a coat, and it will not take being wiped clean. Painting over it is not simply a matter of choosing a fresh colour. The wall drinks the first coat, so a sealing or priming coat usually goes on first and two finish coats after it, otherwise the colour comes up patchy and thin. Modern joinery has the opposite problem. Factory-finished doors, skirting and architrave are smooth and often already coated, so they need abrading and the right primer to key to. Put ordinary paint straight onto them and it sits on the surface rather than sticking, then chips off the first time something knocks it.
The cracks that keep coming back
New and newish houses move as they dry out and settle, and they crack in predictable places: along the joints between plasterboards, above door and window openings, and in the line where the wall meets the ceiling. Fill those with a rigid filler and they open again within a year, because the joint is still moving and the filler is not. So junctions get a flexible sealant that stretches instead, board joints get taped or scrimmed where they have failed, and only genuinely static surfaces get filled hard and sanded. It will not stop a house moving, and nobody honest would say otherwise. What it does is stop the same hairline reappearing across your ceiling line every spring, then being painted over, then reappearing.
The older streets nearer the centre
We are not the painters. SG's own team does the plaster repairs, the filling and the joinery work, and painting is a specialist trade we bring in and manage, with the price and the result staying ours. That distinction matters more on the older 1930s houses near the town centre, where the work is a different animal altogether: original plaster that needs sounding before it is priced, timber windows that need repairing before they are painted, and surfaces that may have been distempered long ago and will not hold emulsion until they are sealed. Same firm, same survey, entirely different specification, and it gets written down separately so you can see which is which.
More in Horley
Everything we do in Horley is on the Horley area sheet, and the full detail of how we approach this trade is on the decorating page.
Common questions
Q.01Our walls mark if you touch them. Is that the paint?
Usually, yes. Contract emulsion is porous and does not take cleaning. Sealing the wall and putting a proper finish coat over it makes it wipeable and stops the marking.
Q.02The crack above our door keeps coming back. Can it be fixed for good?
It can be dealt with sensibly rather than permanently. A moving junction gets a flexible sealant rather than hard filler, so it stretches with the movement instead of cracking through it.
Q.03Can you just paint over the builder's white?
You can, though it usually needs sealing first, otherwise the new colour goes on patchy and takes an extra coat to cover. It works out cheaper to do it once properly.
Q.04Do you cover the estates towards Gatwick?
Yes, across RH6. We are based at 27 High Street, Godstone, a short drive north, and we have been building and refurbishing since 2005.
Thinking about decorating in Horley?
Tell us what you are planning. We come out, look at the job properly and give you a price for it.