Apartment blocks, warehouses, schools and one church spire, painted by nine people who spend April to October outdoors in Kemberley. Everything above three metres is reached on a tower, a lift, a scaffold or a rope, and priced that way on the quote.
Season runs 1 April to 20 October. Three weeks of coating weather left in 2026, and the 2027 book is open from the first week of January.
17 seasons
Painting outdoors here since 2009
Crew of nine
Ours. No agency labour on a wall
IPAF and IRATA
3a and 3b on lifts, level 3 on ropes
$10m
Public liability, certificate with every quote
Lic. #000000
Sample number for this concept
We do not paint houses. Everything here is a building somebody is responsible for: a board, a bursar, a facilities manager or a warden, all of whom have to explain the invoice to somebody else.
Render, balconies, stair cores and up to eighty front doors, priced one elevation at a time so the board can stage it over two seasons.
From $48,000
Profiled cladding, roller shutters and gantries, airless sprayed at weekends when the loading bay cannot stop for us.
$19 per m2 sprayed
Priced in February, painted in the six week holiday, keys back two days before the staff come in. The whole crew on one site.
Surveyed in February
Louvres, weatherboards, clock faces and finials, reached on ropes so the churchyard below stays open and nothing gets tied into old stone.
From $18,400
The inside half of a block. Corridors, handrails, riser doors and flat entrance doors, done floor by floor with one stair always open.
From $340 a floor
Fire escapes, walkways and plant decks. Wire brushed to St2, zinc phosphate primed and two pack coated, mostly off site in our own booth.
Winter work
Access, by height
Paint costs roughly the same at ground level and at thirty metres. Everything else changes. This is the same table we price from, so you can work out most of your own quote before you call us.
Drawn to scale against the tallest thing we work on, the 38 m spire at Ardenhall.
A job we did at this height
Glaswell Court, 56 flats
2,400 m2 of render and four stair cores, twenty six working days across June and July.
We buy three ranges and no more: one masonry, one two pack metal system, one trade gloss. Every tin is listed on the quote by product code, so you can check what actually went on the wall against what you paid for.
Two full coats, every time. A single coat over sound render looks identical on the day you sign it off and fails about four years early.
Exterior jobs are lost after the price is agreed, not before. They are lost in week three, when somebody cannot get to their balcony and rings the board. These six things go in the contract.
A letter through every door ten days out, and a second one the night before your own elevation starts. People forget the first one.
We take one vertical stack of balconies out of use at a time, so nobody loses theirs for more than four days in a twenty six day job.
On site at 7:30 for setting out and masking. No needle guns, grinders or compressors until 9am, and none at all after 4:30pm.
Ground and first floor sheeting comes off every Friday afternoon and goes back on Monday, so nobody spends a weekend in the dark.
We mark the six parking bays the scaffold and the van need on Sunday evening, and we leave the rest of the car park alone.
Residents get a mobile that reaches Elspeth on site, printed on the notice. Not the office, not a form, not an answerphone.
Scaffold travels badly and permits travel worse. This is where we go, how far it is from the yard, and the thing that decides the start date in each one.
56 flats, five storeys, 18 m
Render last coated in 2003, and 41 m2 of it came off in the wash. We patched, primed and put two coats on 2,400 m2, then did four stair cores while the scaffold was still up. The north gable turned out sound, so it came off the invoice at $4,100 before the final bill.
38 m spire, no scaffold
A scaffold around this spire was quoted at $31,000 on its own. Two technicians worked it on ropes off four anchors we pull tested first, and the churchyard stayed open, including for a funeral on the Wednesday. Louvres, weatherboards, the finial and 70 m of lead edge.
Walkways and gantries, off site
Sixty two walkway sections came off the frame in November, went through the booth in our yard over the winter, and went back up in April. The depot lost one weekend of walkway access instead of six weeks of it, and the steel was blasted properly rather than wire brushed in the rain.
Exterior painting is a seven month trade in this climate and pretending otherwise is how coatings fail early. Here is what each month of the season is actually good for, and what we do with the other five.
They took the north gable off the invoice because the render turned out sound. I have chaired this board for nine years and nobody has ever handed money back before the final bill.
Six weeks, one crew, and the corridors were clear for the cleaners every evening. We had the keys back on the Thursday, two days before the staff came in.
They worked the two Sundays we asked for and the loading bay never stopped once. The walkways came back in April looking better than the day they went up.
Forty minutes on site. We photograph every elevation from the ground, fly the top two thirds, and measure the square metres off the stills. You keep the drone images whether or not you use us.
Within three working days. Prep, paint and labour per elevation, access priced separately, so you can see what the height is costing and drop an elevation if the budget says to.
You walk each elevation with the site lead before we strike. Everything on the snag list is done while the access is still there, because going back up costs more than getting it right.
Almost everything we do is occupied. Nobody moves out, nobody loses a week of their balcony, and the only thing residents have to do is take washing in off the line on their own four days. The section above lists exactly what we commit to, and it goes in the contract.
It is on our quote at $310 a week per elevation, and it is our contract with the scaffold firm, so you deal with one company. If the job runs long because of us, the extra weeks are ours. If it runs long because the colour changed in week three, they are yours.
Standing scaffold costs the same whatever the sky is doing, so weather days are built into the programme: four in May, seven in September. You are not charged labour for a day we cannot work, and the programme we send you already has those days in it.
At 18 metres roughly 40 percent of the price is access, not paint. The cheap quote is usually a ladder, one coat, and no prep on the parts nobody can see from the pavement. Ask both of us for the moisture readings and the number of coats in writing, and the gap explains itself.
Every quote carries moisture readings elevation by elevation, taken at four heights with a meter. Above 18 percent we will not coat it. We will tell you what is causing it, usually a failed hopper or a bridged cavity, and what it costs to fix first.
Not outside. February in Kemberley will not give us a surface above 8C overnight, and a masonry coat that does not cure properly fails in three years instead of eleven. We will survey and price in February, do your stair cores or steelwork in the meantime, and be on the wall in April.
Forty minutes on site, nothing to pay, and you keep the drone images either way. We survey within eight working days in season and within three over the winter.
(555) 014-5150Unit 6, Bellfounder Yard, Kemberley. Quotes go out within three working days of the survey, itemised per elevation.