DH Painter & Decorator paints interiors across East Hunsbury (NN4), on Northampton's southern edge roughly 1.9 miles from the centre. Dean covers walls, ceilings and woodwork in the detached and semi-detached homes of Merefield, Blacky More and Collingtree Park, dealing with textured ceilings, tired builder-grade finishes and rooms replastered after surface-water flooding.
Builder-grade finishes, thirty-odd years on
Most of the homes in this NN4 suburb went up across two decades, the eighties and nineties, on fields and worked-out ironstone pits south of the town. Almost every house on the estates between Mere Way and the brook comes from that one building period, so the insides share a family likeness: plasterboard and plaster walls, standard ceiling heights, softwood doors and skirtings, and a two-storey layout with a straight staircase.
Repainting here tends to follow a change of owner, when new arrivals want the previous occupant’s colours gone, or it comes when the finishes the developer used have simply worn out. Builder-grade emulsion was usually thin and chalky, and it marks easily. Over decades it picks up scuffs, filled screw holes and patched cracks where the house settled. We wash and key it, fill and sand the damage, and spot-prime any repairs before the first full coat so they don’t show through as dull patches.
Open-plan lounge-diners and the conservatory join
A typical East Hunsbury house has a lounge that runs through to a dining area, and many have had a conservatory or sun room added at the back. Property adverts for a Thames Road semi and a Stanford Way detached house both mention conservatory or sun-room additions. It changes how an interior repaint is planned:
- A through-room is one continuous wall run, so it needs painting in one go with paint from the same batch. If it’s painted in two halves, the line between them can show where the light from the conservatory falls across it.
- Where the conservatory opens off the lounge, the old back wall is now an inside wall, and the brickwork or render reveal around the opening often needs filling and sealing before it will take emulsion evenly.
- Cutting in against uPVC conservatory frames has to be clean, because white plastic shows every slip of colour.
En-suites are common in the larger detached houses. They are small rooms that steam up quickly, so we use a moisture-resistant emulsion and make sure any mould spotting is treated and dry first.
Textured ceilings: overpaint or skim?
Houses from this period often still have their original textured ceilings, usually called Artex, and sometimes woodchip on a wall or two. Both affect the quote. Textured ceilings can be overpainted if they are sound, and a fresh coat in a flat matt finish is the quickest route. The alternative is having them skimmed by a plasterer, then mist-coating and painting the new surface. That costs more, but it gives you a smooth modern ceiling. Dean will tell you honestly which one your ceiling suits when he visits.
One point worth knowing: textured coatings applied before 2000 can contain asbestos, and almost every house here predates that. It is sensible to have a ceiling tested before anyone sands or scrapes it. We never sand an untested textured ceiling, and we can overpaint one without disturbing it.
Ground floors that have been dried out
Rain that falls on the higher ground here drains downhill through former valley lines, and in heavy storms some of it has ended up indoors. Flood records list homes on Lichfield Drive hit twice, in 2005 and 2007, plus two on Marlowe Close, and Rowtree Road caught runoff from Grange Wood Park in August 2012. If your downstairs walls were hacked off and redone after one of those events, give the fresh plaster its full drying time before any paint goes near it. It then needs a diluted mist coat so the emulsion bonds instead of peeling. Our new plaster and extension painting page explains the process in more detail.
Planning the work around a family house
Driveways and garages are normal here, which lets us leave the van on the drive and set up a cutting and mixing area in the garage. This keeps the house tidier than in a terrace with no off-road space. We usually work room by room, so you can keep living in the house. A typical order is upstairs first and the through-lounge last, so the main living space is out of action for the shortest time. For the wider service, see our interior painting in Northampton page, or go back to the East Hunsbury area page.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
