Interior painting for Brooklyn row houses

A row house is narrow, deep and tall, and that shape decides how it gets painted. Rooms have windows at two ends and a long blind middle. The stair runs the full height of the house against a wall nobody can reach from the floor. Most of the plaster is original, on lath, and it has moved.

The stairwell

Three or four storeys of continuous wall over a flight of stairs is the hardest surface in the house to paint and the one most often skipped. There is no floor to stand a ladder on for most of it. It gets done properly by building staging over the treads so the whole height can be cut in and rolled in one pass, which is also the only way the finish matches from the parlour floor to the top landing.

We would rather tell you at the estimate that the stairwell is a day of access before a brush is opened than discover it halfway through and ask for more.

A room with light at both ends and none in the middle

A parlour floor is often twenty feet or more front to back with windows only at the two ends. A colour chosen from a chip at the window will read as a different colour six feet in, and the middle of the room will go flat and grey in a way the sample never showed.

So we paint a sample on the wall in the middle of the room rather than at the window, and look at it in the evening as well as at midday. It costs an hour and it is the difference between a colour you chose and a colour you settled for.

Old trim, and what happens before it is sanded

These houses came with deep trim and it usually carries a great many coats. Where paint that old is going to be sanded, we test it first rather than assume what is in it. That is our own practice and it changes the method rather than the price: sound old paint gets cleaned and keyed by hand, failing paint comes off, and nothing gets dry sanded before we know what it is.

Stripping trim back to bare timber is a separate decision with a real cost. It is worth it where the profile has been lost under the build up, and it is money wasted where the surface is simply tired.

Plaster, and the wall you share

Original lath and plaster cracks along its own lines, and a crack that keeps coming back is telling you something is moving rather than that the filler was wrong. We open those, establish whether the plaster has parted from the lath behind it, and refix or patch accordingly.

The party wall belongs to two houses. Anything that hammers or vibrates goes through it, so wall repair here is planned around the hours that are allowed and around the neighbour on the other side.

Questions people ask