DH Painter & Decorator paints interiors across St James (NN5), the district just over the River Nene about 0.6 miles west of Northampton town centre. Dean handles everything from a single terraced front room to a whole flat, with preparation planned around Victorian plaster, damp-prone ground floors and newer plasterboard.
Three generations of house, three different sets of walls
St James grew in the second half of the 19th century as housing for people working in its shoe factories, tannery and engineering works, and most of what you walk past on streets such as Wimbledon Street and Althorp Road is still that Victorian terraced stock. Alongside it sit the homes built in 1999-2000 on the former Express Lift Abbey Works site off Weedon Road, newer townhouses around Bruce Street, Ross Road and Countess Road, and purpose-built flats. Each of these needs a different approach once the dust sheets go down.
In the older terraces the plaster is rarely flat. A century and more of patching, rewiring and replastered chimney breasts leaves walls with hollows, ridges and hairline cracks that a fresh coat of emulsion will show up rather than hide. The 1999-2000 houses are a simpler surface, usually plasterboard with joint lines and nail pops that need spotting and sanding. The flats tend to be about access and protection of shared areas more than surface repair.
Ground floors near the river
Low-lying stretches of St James Road, Harlestone Road and Weedon Road sit in the River Nene floodplain. Residents there were evacuated in the Good Friday flood of 1998, and although the banks have since been raised, some ground-floor rooms still carry the marks: salts blooming through the paint, a tidemark low on the wall or plaster that sounds hollow when tapped.
Painting straight over that is wasted money. Before quoting a front room or kitchen on those streets, Dean checks the lower walls with a moisture meter and looks for efflorescence. Where the wall is still wet, we’ll tell you it needs a damp specialist or plasterer first. Where it has dried out, salts are brushed off and the surface is sealed and finished with a breathable emulsion so any residual moisture can leave the wall rather than push the paint off it.
Small rooms, steep stairs and how we work around them
Houses built for shoe and engineering workers were never generous. Front rooms are compact, the hallway is often a single person wide and the stairs run straight and steep to a small landing. That changes the logistics more than the painting:
- A sofa and sideboard in a compact terrace front room have nowhere else to go, so they are pulled together and sheeted where they stand.
- Dust sheets run from the front door to the room being worked on, since the hallway is the only route through the house.
- Stairwells need a stair platform or a ladder set-up that fits a narrow, steep flight; we cover this in more depth on the hallways and stairs page.
- Rooms are done one at a time so a household can keep living in the rest of the house.
Parking matters too. Kerbside space on the Victorian streets is already tight, and a fixture at Franklin’s Gardens or Sixfields squeezes it further. We plan van arrival and the delivery of materials around fixture dates rather than discover the problem on the morning.
Rented homes and the 25-year-old houses
Letting agents sell St James on its walk to the station and the town centre, and the terraces, townhouses and flats they advertise here need finishes that survive from one tenancy to the next. For those we lean towards durable, wipeable finishes in neutral tones that touch up cleanly between tenancies. The houses on the former lift works site are now about 25 years old, which is often when original builders’ emulsion finally needs a full redecoration rather than another patch.
The detailed process we follow, from filling and sanding to cutting in, is on our main interior painting in Northampton page. For a wider look at the district and the other work we take on here, see our St James area page, and for an idea of costs, the painter and decorator cost guide.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
