DH Painter & Decorator decorates hallways, stairs and landings in Kings Heath, the NN5 estate 1.7 miles north-west of the town centre. The estate's 1950s houses mostly have a narrow hall and one straight flight, which wear hard in family homes, while the 2025 town houses on Park Walk have stairwells rising three storeys.
The shape of a Womersley hallway
J L Womersley planned Kings Heath in 1950 for around 5,000 residents, mostly in terraced and semi-detached houses that the Historic Environment Record describes as standing almost unaltered. Many still have the original post-war layout: a front door opening into a narrow hall, a straight staircase rising to a small landing, and doors off to one main living room and smaller bedrooms. There are no turns or half-landings to break the flight up.
That layout drives the whole job. A straight flight gives one tall wall running the length of the stairs, with the ceiling over the top steps the hardest part to reach. The hall itself is too narrow to set up wide steps, so we use a combination ladder with independently adjustable legs on the treads and a short staging board where the drop is greatest. No ladder is balanced on a single tread, and the stairs stay passable between stages. The equipment and methods are described on our main hallway, stairs and landing page.
Wear and tear in a busy family hall
In a compact post-war house, everyone goes through the hall: bikes and pushchairs, school bags, shopping, the vacuum cleaner. Walls at hand and shoulder height take the knocks, the bottom few steps get scuffed, and the handrail and spindles carry years of grime. After seventy years of redecorating, the walls usually have a thick history of paint and filler, so we expect to fill and spot-prime a fair amount before any colour goes on.
- Scrubbable matt or durable eggshell on the walls, so marks wash off without leaving shiny patches.
- Satin on spindles, newel posts and skirtings for a hard, wipeable surface.
- Darker or mid-tone lower walls where a household is particularly hard on the hall.
- Lining paper where old plaster is crazed or patched, before the paint goes on.
Park Walk: three storeys of stairwell
Park Walk’s three-storey houses, finished in 2025, change the geometry. With three storeys there are two flights stacked over each other, so the top landing wall can sit well above the ground-floor hall. Reaching it safely needs a stair platform or a short tower, set up so the family can still get past to the bedrooms.
The plaster in these houses is new too. Fresh plaster in a stairwell needs a mist coat before any colour, and hairline cracks often appear where walls meet ceilings during the first year. We usually suggest waiting until those have shown, then filling and decorating once rather than twice.
Getting the kit to the front door
Stair work needs more kit than most rooms: a combination ladder, staging boards and runners. Where a house faces a path or green instead of a road, all of it may have to be carried some way from where the van can park, so we check access when we come to look and plan the order of work around it. Hallways are usually done in one run over a few days, with the stairs usable each evening.
Inside, the narrow hall leaves little room to store tins and boards, so we keep a single working area by the front door and lay non-slip runners down the stairs rather than loose sheets that could slide underfoot. If the front door is part of the job, its outside face is painted on a dry, still day, because houses facing the open greens get little shelter from wind and rain.
More about the property types we work on locally is on our Kings Heath page.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
