Painters in Footscray
Weatherboard cottages, period brick, converted warehouses and shopfronts, often on the same street. Footscray is a mix of everything, which means the preparation changes from one surface to the next rather than one recipe covering the whole job.
Cottages, converted warehouses and shopfronts
- Graffiti is the local problemTags turn up on side walls, roller doors and rear laneways more often here than in most of Melbourne. Painting straight over a tag rarely works: the marker or the aerosol works its way up through fresh paint inside a few weeks and the tag reappears like a ghost. It has to be sealed with a stain blocking primer first, then finished. Done properly it stays gone, and the wall can be brought back the same day rather than looking patched for months.
- Workers cottages in weatherboardThe old streets are full of small single fronted timber cottages, many of them well over a century old, with boards that have moved and split. Every board gets sanded, splits and nail holes filled, bare timber primed. On a cottage this size the difference between a proper job and a quick one is a few days, and it decides whether the coat lasts five years or lifts inside two.
- Warehouses and brick that became homesPlenty of Footscray buildings started as factories and workshops and are now apartments, studios and offices. Painted brick, rendered panels and steel turn up on one facade, and no two of them take the same system. Steel needs its own primer, render needs every crack raked out and filled, and old painted brick needs checking for whatever is already on it before anything new goes over the top.
- Shopfronts that cannot shutAlong the retail strips the work has to happen around trading, which usually means staged sections or a night shift between closing and opening. A shopfront is also the most looked at wall a business owns, so cut lines around signage, glazing and tiles carry far more weight than the area would imply.
- Close to the city, exposed to the westThese streets sit low and open with little shelter, and the western walls take the full afternoon sun. That is where the fade shows first, and why an exterior here often needs the sunny elevation looked at before the rest of the building is due.
Brick that has already been painted
Cottages, warehouse walls and shopfronts around here have mostly been coated at some point already. What is on the wall now decides most of the work, and most of the price.
- Painted brick does not go backOnce brick has been coated, stripping a whole facade back to bare is rarely realistic. So the question is never whether to remove it. It is what condition the existing coating is in, and what will hold on top of it.
- Anything loose comes off firstWhere the old coat is flaking or has blown away from the surface, it has to go, or the new paint lifts with it and takes the repair back to the start. On an old wall that scraping and washing is most of the labour, not a step before the labour.
- Washing back is a job of its ownHigh pressure washing opens the surface and takes off the dust, grime and salts that stop a coating gripping. On a large facade it is a day in itself, and it belongs on the quote as its own line rather than being assumed.
- A damp wall will push the coating offOld brick that draws moisture up from the ground forces a new coating off from behind, and nothing done to the face of the wall fixes that. Where a wall is damp low down, the cause gets looked at before anything is quoted.
- Mortar joints before paintWhere joints have washed out, they want making good first. Paint will bridge an open joint for a season, then split along the line it was hiding, and from the footpath that reads as a bad paint job.
More on high pressure cleaning, on its own or before painting →
Work we have done in Footscray
An office block of two levels taken right around the outside, from pale render marked with tags to a full charcoal.
Two storey office building, full exterior repaint
A full external repaint here in Footscray, commissioned by the owner rather than through a builder. The old pale walls carried graffiti on the side elevation and at the base of the corner, so those areas were sorted out first, ahead of any colour. The walls go up a long way, so anything above the first level was worked off a boom lift with the car park below still open. Shown as the entrance, the side wall, the corner with its blue panel and the finished street frontage.
Painting services in Footscray
The same range we bring to any Melbourne home, whether the job is one room or the whole house inside and out. In Footscray the same crew also handles shopfronts, warehouse conversions and graffiti removal, because on these streets the house and the business are often the same building.
Whose job is it
A homeowner, a builder, a business owner and someone with a period house worry about completely different things. Pick the one that fits and you will get the answers written for you.
Homeowners
- You stay in the house while we work
- Covers down before anything starts
- One fixed price, not an hourly rate
Builders
- We hold the date we gave you
- Sequenced around the trades behind us
- Priced in a day or two
Commercial
- Staged or overnight, you keep trading
- Access and hours agreed up front
- Shops, offices, schools, warehouses
Heritage
- Ornate plaster cut in by hand
- Old surfaces sanded, not covered
- Council checked before colour
Painting a home or a shopfront in Footscray?
Tell us the address and what you are planning. We will come and look, then give you one fixed price.
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Mark will get back to you within one business day, usually a lot sooner.
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