DH Painter & Decorator paints interior doors, frames, skirtings, picture rails and front doors in White Hills, NN2, about 2.8 miles north of Northampton town centre. Dean prepares old layered gloss on the inter-war estate houses properly before any new coat goes on.
Joinery from the 1930s, buried under later coats
White Hills began in the 1930s as an estate opposite Kingsthorpe Cemetery, off Harborough Road, so a good share of its houses are inter-war rather than Victorian or modern. That shows most in the woodwork. Plenty of these homes still have original panelled internal doors, tall moulded skirtings and picture rails, and over ninety-odd years the usual habit has been to add another coat of gloss without taking anything off.
The result is familiar once you open a door in one of these houses: panel mouldings softened by paint, door edges that rub on the frame, hinges painted solid, and skirting tops with a ridge of old drips. A fresh coat on top of all that only makes it thicker. The job is mostly about getting back to a sound, flat surface.
Strip, or prepare and build up?
Not every door needs stripping. We look at each piece of woodwork and pick one of three routes:
- Key and repaint where the old gloss is sound and well bonded, with dents filled and sanded flush.
- Partial stripping of mouldings, panel edges and hinge sides where build-up has clogged the detail or stops the door closing.
- Full stripping where the layers are cracking, flaking or crazed right across the face, because new paint will fail with them.
Paint applied to timber before the 1960s may contain lead, and on a 1930s house the bottom layers are old enough to need that assumption. We test where it matters and use wet abrasion and chemical stripping rather than dry sanding or burning, keeping dust off floors and out of the rest of the house. Picture rails are often the worst, because they sit high, rarely get cleaned and have been painted in whatever colour the walls were at the time.
Once the surface is right we usually move from oil gloss to a water-based satin or eggshell for interior joinery. These stay white for longer than traditional gloss, which yellows quickly in hallways and on north-facing landings. Our main door and skirting painting page covers primers and coat systems in more detail.
Long skirting runs in the detached homes on Harborough Road North
Along Harborough Road North and private drives such as Anchor Drive, White Hills also has individually built detached houses on large plots. One listed at about 2,226 sq ft gives a sense of the scale. These homes have several reception rooms, so the woodwork is a different kind of job: long continuous skirting runs, double doors between rooms, and more door linings and architraves per floor than a typical estate house has in total.
On a house like that, woodwork can be phased room by room so the rooms you live in stay usable, or done as one pass once wall painting is finished. Doing doors and skirtings last avoids roller spatter and scuffs from moving ladders. If you share a private drive, it helps to tell neighbours roughly when a van will be parked for a few days.
Front doors on the trunk road and the exposed edge
External woodwork in White Hills sees two problems that sheltered inner streets avoid. Frontages on Harborough Road North, which is mapped as a trunk road, pick up traffic grime, so a front door or frame there needs a thorough degrease and rinse before sanding, or the new paint will sit on a film of road dirt. On the outermost houses facing the open countryside to the north, wind and driven rain dry out and lift paint on timber faster, especially on bottom rails and the lower edges of door frames.
For those doors we pay particular attention to sealing the bottom edge and end grain and to using a flexible exterior system that moves with the timber. Where an original timber door has been kept, repairing and repainting it is usually worth doing before anyone talks about replacement.
For other jobs in the district, see the White Hills area page, and for how woodwork pricing is worked out, read the painter and decorator cost guide.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
