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Nine parts preparation, one part paint.
Painting and decorating across Godmanchester, Huntingdon and the Cambridgeshire villages. A fresh breath for a tired room, and one that lasts. Anyone can make a wall look good on the day the dust sheets come up. The test is what it looks like two winters later. That is decided long before the first coat: in the filling, the sanding, the caulking and the priming that nobody ever sees.
Decorating, inside and out
- Rooms painted properly: walls, ceilings, woodwork
- Hallways, stairs and landings, including the awkward heights
- Interior woodwork: skirting, architrave, doors and frames
- External joinery repainted before the weather gets in
- Front doors given the finish they deserve
- Small plaster repairs and making good before painting
- Sealant and caulking, neatly cut in
- Feature walls, colour changes and freshening for sale or let
Panelling and media walls
The part of decorating that is not paint on a surface which already exists. Panelling, media wall units, and the wallpapering and feature walls that go with them. Built and then finished by the same hands, which matters more than it sounds.
Panelling is not carpentry with some painting afterwards. On a proper shaker or square run, the filling, caulking and sanding is close to half the labour, because every joint between stile and rail has to disappear completely. A joiner who does not decorate leaves you a wall of visible joints, and a decorator who did not set it out cannot fix them. We do both parts, which is the only reason the finished thing reads as part of the house rather than as something screwed onto it.
- Half-height panelling, set out so the panel widths look deliberate, £170 a metre
- Full-height panelling, cut around every socket and switch, £250 a metre
- One feature wall, a typical four metres, from £685
- Through a hall, stairs and landing, from £2,875
- Media wall unit built in, cables routed inside it, from £1,405
- Media wall with a recessed electric fire aperture, from £1,860
- Feature wall prepared and painted, £220
- Wallpaper hung, £80 a roll, or stripped and the wall made good from £325
Hall, stairs and landing is priced as its own job rather than by the metre, because it is a different job. The raking run along the string has to be set out so the panels look intentional against the pitch of the stairs, the returns at the newels and on the landing have to line through, and almost every cut is an angle. It takes about a week, and the figure above is a floor rather than a promise.
On media walls the cable routing is where they usually go wrong: a unit gets built and somebody else is left to solve the wiring afterwards, so it ends up trailing. We run it inside the frame as we build. The fire is yours to choose and electric only, because a gas fire in a media wall is Gas Safe work and belongs with a registered engineer.
Why our decorating lasts
Preparation first
Surfaces filled, sanded and primed properly. Paint hides nothing for long; preparation is the job, the painting is the reward.
Materials that repay care
Good paint protects as well as decorates. We will tell you where quality genuinely matters and where it is marketing. Everyday sundries are included in our prices; paint chosen for your job is itemised at cost plus a small handling charge, shown plainly in the quote.
Patience where it counts
Paint must dry. Caulk must cure. If the proper result needs another day, we say so up front and price accordingly. Rushed finishing is just slow failure.
The underside deserves the same care as the top
There is an old saying among cabinet makers that the underside deserves the same care as the top, whether or not anyone will ever see it. We decorate the same way. The painted edge nobody will inspect. The cutting-in behind the radiator. The line where wall meets ceiling, straight enough that your eye never snags on it.
These details are not about showing off. They are habits. Habits become standards, and standards become reputation. When we leave, the room should feel as though it has simply always been that way.
And if the room deserves more than paint, decorating is the finishing move of our Room Refresh: the whole space taken from tired to finished, every trade it needs, one written price.
A typical bedroom, walls and ceiling, is around £700 to £1,100; add woodwork for roughly £400. Hall, stairs and landing generally lands near £1,700 because of the heights involved. A front door done properly is around £375. All quoted in writing after we have seen the space.
These are starting points, not a menu. Combine them, split them, or ask for the one job you actually want. If that is a single curtain pole, send us that one line and a single curtain pole is all we will price.
If three walls are tired and one is fine, we will paint three. A room does not need doing all at once simply because a decorator is standing in it. We would rather come back in two years for the fourth wall than talk you into it today, and the room will not look patched, because matching an existing finish is part of the job.
Decorators decorate. We finish rooms. If the socket beside the door is crooked, the handle is loose and the window has stuck since 2019, those come with the painting rather than waiting for somebody else to be booked. That is the whole idea behind the Room Refresh.
Why we work this way is set out in the Book of Care, free and with nothing to sell in it.
Thinking about a room, or the whole house?
Send us a photo and rough sizes and we will come back with a realistic figure. Before we commit to it we will want to see the walls for ourselves, because preparation is most of the job and photographs hide a multitude of sins. The fixed price follows that look.