We paint shopfronts and business frontages in Greens Norton, about 8.5 miles south-west of Northampton and just over a mile from Towcester. With only a few village premises, each frontage is a one-off job planned around its opening times and its stone setting.
A few frontages, each one different
Greens Norton has no parade or business park. Its commercial premises are a village shop, a post office, a butcher, the community-run Butchers Arms pub and the doctors’ surgery, alongside the village hall on High Street (the former school) and the community centre. Each frontage is a one-off rather than one of a row, so there is no standard shopfront to price. One may be little more than a painted door, window frame and fascia board on a stone building; another may be pub joinery, a signboard and outdoor woodwork. The general process for preparing and painting a frontage around trade is on our shopfront painting service page. Here we cover what working in this village involves.
The Butchers Arms and its newer parts
Local volunteers saved the Butchers Arms and reopened it in 2017, and it has since been overhauled and enlarged. That leaves a building with two kinds of fabric, the older parts of the pub and newer extension joinery and surfaces, which don’t age at the same rate or take the same products. New timber needs knotting, priming and building up from bare; older joinery may carry decades of paint that needs scraping back and spot-priming. Matching colour and sheen across both, so the frontage reads as one building, is the fiddly part, and we sample on each surface before committing.
A pub’s outside also takes heavy use: doors pushed all day, window boards leaned on, and a sign that needs to stay legible. We paint the main entrance at the start or end of a day so customers aren’t brushing wet paint at busy times, and agree the order of work with whoever runs the pub before starting.
Food, counters and patients
The butcher and village shop sell food, so we use low-odour, water-based exterior products wherever the surface allows and keep dust well away from doors and open windows. Scraping and sanding happen at the quietest times you can give us. For the post office, keeping the entrance usable and clearly signed matters most, and the same is even more true of the surgery, where patients may arrive with sticks, walkers or wheelchairs.
| Premises | Main concern | How we handle it |
|---|---|---|
| Butcher and village shop | Food on sale, smells | Low-odour products, preparation outside trading peaks |
| Post office | Steady footfall through one door | Entrance painted first or last, clearly signed |
| Surgery | Patients with limited mobility | Unobstructed route in at all times |
| Butchers Arms | Old and new fabric side by side | Separate systems, matched colour |
Colour on a stone street
High Street and the lanes around it are lined with coursed limestone and ironstone buildings, many of them listed, though the village has no conservation area. Painted joinery and boards are seen against honey and orange-brown stone, and deep traditional colours such as dark greens, blues, oxblood and off-blacks usually look settled there, where very bright corporate colours can jar. If a frontage is part of a listed building, a change of colour may need consent from West Northamptonshire Council, while repainting like for like usually does not, so check before ordering paint. New signage can need separate advertisement consent. If your premises sit in an older building, ask us to look at the stonework round the frontage too, so paint stays on the joinery and off the stone.
For more about the village, see our Greens Norton page, and for budgeting, our painter and decorator cost guide.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
