DH Painter & Decorator paints house interiors across Semilong (NN2), 0.8 miles north of Northampton town centre. Dean takes on single rooms, let bedrooms and whole houses, planning preparation around cellar damp, old plaster and the fact that every tin and dust sheet comes through the front door.
What sits under the hall floor
A lot of the late Victorian and Edwardian terraces in Semilong were built with cellars. Estate agents mention cellars in listings on Stanley Street and St Pauls Road, among others. A cellar is useful storage, but it is also the usual reason a hall or kitchen wall in these houses won’t hold paint. Moisture rises around the cellar head and the stair down, and the result is flaking emulsion along the bottom metre of the wall, a powdery surface or a faint tide mark that keeps reappearing.
Before quoting, Dean checks those walls with a moisture meter. If the reading says the wall is still wet, we will tell you plainly that it needs a damp specialist or plasterer first, because paint applied over it will fail. If it has dried, loose material and salts are brushed back, the surface is sealed where it needs it, and the finish coat is a breathable emulsion that lets any remaining moisture out rather than trapping it. Houses on the lower streets that fall towards St Andrews Road and the Nene valley get the same check on their ground-floor rooms.
One room at a time in shared houses
With so many Semilong houses let as HMOs and tenants changing often, interior painting here is frequently needed one bedroom at a time, around tenants who are still living in the rest of the house. We work to that: a single let room emptied, filled, sanded and painted, with the door kept shut and the shared kitchen and bathroom left usable.
For those rooms the finish matters more than the colour. A durable matt or a washable emulsion copes with furniture being moved in and out, Blu Tack and the odd suitcase scraped down a wall. Ceilings in older bedrooms often have fine cracks along the old lath lines; we fill and line those where needed rather than painting over and hoping. Owners of whole houses get the same preparation, just across more rooms. The wider approach to prep and paint choice is set out on our interior painting service page.
Getting in through a single front door
A Semilong mid-terrace has one way in: the front door, off the pavement or a tiny front area, with no side passage to the garden. Steps, boards, paint and dust sheets all travel along the hall and up a narrow staircase. That is why every interior job here starts with protecting the hall floor, the stair treads and the banister before any room is touched, and why we bring in only what the day’s work needs.
Parking shapes the day too. Semilong Road is busy and lined with parked cars. We plan to unload early and keep the van loading quick, so the pavement outside your door isn’t blocked for long.
Taller rooms on the St Pauls Road and Barrack Road side
Not every house is a two-up two-down. St Pauls Road has bigger houses, among them a six-bedroom, three-storey Victorian terrace with sashes and a cellar, and the narrow-frontage terraces along Barrack Road were built on three floors too, many now flats or offices. Those buildings bring higher ceilings, deeper skirtings, older cornices and longer stair runs, so the job takes more ladder work and more careful cutting in. Inside the windows, original timber sashes need painting so they still slide afterwards: we free each one off after the paint has cured rather than leaving it stuck shut.
- Cellar-head and hall walls: moisture check, salts removed, breathable finish
- Let bedrooms: durable, washable emulsion and quick turnaround room by room
- Three-storey houses: extra access for stairwells and high ceilings
- Sash windows: painted, then eased so they open
For a sense of what shapes the price of one room or a whole house, read the cost guide; the Semilong area page lists the rest of what we do here.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
