Wraybury, and the same four hands since 1968
Four painters, one family, and the same prep we used in 1968.
Cyril Marlbrook started with a handcart and a bicycle. His son, his grandson and his granddaughter still paint the same streets, and three houses in this town have had us three times under three different owners. Nobody here subcontracts anything.
- 1968
- Cyril’s first year, on a bicycle
- Four
- painters, all on our own books
- $520
- an average room, prep and two coats
- 2 weeks
- from your yes to ladders up
Second coat on a back bedroom in Netherstow, day three of four.
- Painting Wraybury since 1968Cyril Marlbrook started it. His son, his grandson and his granddaughter still run it.
- Four painters, no subcontractorsThe four faces you meet at the quote are the four who finish the job.
- $2m public liabilityLic. #000000 (sample). The certificate is attached to every written price.
- Two weeks from yes to laddersYou get a start date in writing, not a promise of sometime in the spring.
What we do indoors, and what we do up a ladder.
Two different jobs with two different diaries. Interiors run all year. Exteriors run April to October, because paint on a cold wet wall is money you spend twice.
Inside
Rooms and ceilings
Walls, ceiling, skirting, architrave and the doors. $520 for an average bedroom including prep and two full coats.
Halls, stairs and landings
We bring a tower for the stairwell, because nobody should be balancing a ladder on a stair tread in your house. $1,450.
Kitchen doors, sprayed
Doors and drawer fronts come off to the unit on Saltbox Row, get sprayed flat and come back on Friday. $2,300 for a twenty door kitchen.
Wallpaper
Effie hangs it. Lining paper, grasscloth, and the heavy Victorian patterns that most firms quote high to avoid.
Heritage woodwork
Panelling, shutters, picture rails and panelled doors, filled and rubbed down by hand so the mouldings keep their edges.
Outside
Render and masonry
Washed down, stabilised where it is chalking, then two coats of breathable masonry paint. We expect twelve to fifteen years out of it.
Timber and weatherboard
Back to bare timber wherever the old paint has let go, and primed the same day it is stripped. Bare wood never sits overnight.
Sash windows
Stan strips them, re-putties and rebuilds the sills where the rot is shallow. $340 a window rebuilt, $180 where the timber is sound.
Front doors and porches
Oil based gloss on front doors. It smells, it takes a day to dry, and it still outlasts every water-based gloss on a door that gets slammed.
Gutters, fascias and railings
Cleared out while we are up there, and you get told what your roof looks like from the ladder whether you asked or not.
Houses we have painted twice.
Anyone can show you a finished room. This is the harder proof: the same address years later, what our paint looked like on the morning we came back to it, and what we had to do about it.
Drag the handle, or focus it and use the arrow keys. Sample photographs, for illustration.
12 Saltbox Row, Wraybury
Victorian end terrace, full exterior
- Painted
- 1996, 2009 and again in 2024
- Owners
- Three families. We have never been asked to quote against anyone here.
- How we found it
- Twenty-eight years of south-westerly weather had chalked the front elevation and opened the joints on the bay. The north side, out of the sun, was still sound enough to wash and recoat.
- What we did
- Burned off the bay back to bare timber, rebuilt two sash sills, primed the same afternoon, then two coats of exterior eggshell on everything and masonry paint on the render.
- Paint and crew
- Dunnock Masonry on the render, Hartsend exterior eggshell on the joinery. Stan and Ivor, eleven working days.
- Invoiced
- $7,400 in 2024. It was $3,100 in 1996.
Four addresses we have now painted three times
Effie keeps the job book. These four have been repainted by a Marlbrook under three different sets of owners, and we still have the colour codes for all of them.
- 3 Tanyard Steps, Wraybury1981, 1998, 2016
- Ivyhouse Farm, Oldbarrow1974, 1993, 2012
- 58 Brewer’s Hill, Clayhanger1989, 2007, 2023
- The Reading Rooms, Wraybury1978, 1999, 2021
Prep, written out, so you can hold us to it.
A cheap quote and an expensive quote buy the same paint. What they do not buy is the two days before the paint. This list is on the back of every price we write, and you are welcome to stand in the doorway and check it off.
We move what we can move and stack the rest in the middle of the room, then sheet it. Handles, sockets, switch plates and curtain poles come off, and they go in a labelled bag.
Every surface gets washed with sugar soap and rinsed. Paint does not stick to a greasy kitchen wall or a nicotine ceiling, and no primer will save it.
Fill, sand, then fill again wherever the first fill has sunk. Nobody sees a filled hole from the doorway. Everyone sees it at eleven in the morning in June.
Caulk the line where the trim meets the wall, and cut out and redo any caulk that has cracked since the last time.
Spot prime every bare patch, every knot, every water stain and every filled repair, and let the primer go off properly before anything else happens.
Two full coats. Not one coat and a touch up where it looks thin, and never a coat rolled on wet over a coat that was still soft.
Sockets back on, doors rehung, hinges wiped, floors hoovered, and the room put back the way we found it before we ask you to look at it.
And three things we will not do, whatever the price
- We will not paint over wallpaper that is lifting. It will show through inside a year and then it is our name on it.
- We will not paint a damp wall. If the meter reads wet we find out why first, even if it costs us the booking.
- We will not paint an exterior below eight degrees or onto anything that is not bone dry. That is why our exterior diary runs April to October.
What a room costs, and what a house costs.
Real 2026 prices from the job book, not a range designed to get us through the door. Every one includes the prep above, two full coats and trade-price paint itemised on the invoice.
By the room, inside
- Average bedroom, walls and ceiling
- $520
- Average bedroom including woodwork, door and skirting
- $690
- Living room up to 18 feet, walls, ceiling and woodwork
- $880
- Bathroom or cloakroom
- $430
- Hall, stairs and landing, including the stairwell tower
- $1,450
- Kitchen doors and drawer fronts, sprayed at the unit
- $2,300
By the house, outside
- Two-bed terrace or cottage, full exterior
- from $4,900
- Three-bed semi, full exterior
- from $6,800
- Four-bed detached, full exterior
- from $9,400
- Sash window stripped, re-puttied and the sill rebuilt
- $340 each
- Sash window where the timber is sound
- $180 each
- Front door, oil gloss, three coats
- $390
Ceilings over ten feet, or a room stacked full of furniture we have to move twice, are priced on the visit.
Stripping woodwork that has been painted eleven times is charged by the day at $340, and Ivor will tell you before he writes it.
The minimum charge is $520, so one small cloakroom costs the same as a bedroom.
The paint we buy, and three patches on your own wall.
We buy five things and we have bought them for years. If you want something else we will use it, but we will tell you first what we think of it.
- Ceilings and walls
- Barrowfield Trade MattIt covers in two coats and it does not flash when you touch it up in a year.
- Interior woodwork
- Hartsend water-based eggshellLow smell and hard in four hours, so you get the room back the night we finish it.
- Front doors and railings
- Hartsend oil glossSlower and smellier, and still the only thing worth putting on a door that gets slammed.
- Period rooms
- Pellet & Hale heritage coloursEffie matches them and we keep your codes on file, so a touch up in 2031 is the same colour.
- Exterior render
- Dunnock MasonryBreathable, so an old solid wall can still dry out through the paint instead of blowing it off.
Paint names on this concept site stand in for real trade ranges. On a live site they would be the ones you actually buy, with your own reasons next to them.
Colour help costs nothing, because a card lies
Effie paints three patches a foot square on your own wall, one on the darkest side of the room and two by the window, and we leave them for two days. A chip under a shop light has sent more people back to the tin than any painter ever has.
No charge, whether or not you go on to book the work.
Dust sheets, not bin bags.
Most complaints about painters are not about paint. They are about somebody’s house being treated like a building site for a fortnight. Here is exactly how we behave in yours.
Cotton sheets on floors, plastic only over furniture
Plastic on a floor is a slip hazard and it holds the dust rather than catching it.
On site 8am, off site 4:30pm
No early starts under your bedroom window, no working past teatime, and no radio louder than a conversation.
Doors stay shut, and we tell you before we open one
Two of us have dogs. Tell us the cat is a bolter and we will work around it.
Water-based inside as standard
Low odour, so nobody is sleeping at their sister’s because the landing smells of gloss.
Our waste leaves with us
Tins, sheets, masking and filler dust. Your bin is your bin.
If we mark something, we put it right
Repaired, replaced or paid for, that week. That is what the $2m and thirty years of a local name are for.
$2m public liability and $500,000 employer cover, both current, both attached to the written price. Lic. #000000 (sample).
(555) 014-1968
The four of us, and Cyril, who still turns up to look at Victorians.
Cyril Marlbrook painted his first house on Saltbox Row in 1968 and handed the business to Ivor in 1991. He is 84, he does not climb anything any more, and he still walks round a period exterior before we quote it.
Ivor MarlbrookCyril’s son, on the tools since 1979
Cuts in freehand and will not use tape on a ceiling line. Prices every job himself, and turns down about one in six.
Wilf MarlbrookThird generation, sprayer
Runs the spray booth in the unit at Saltbox Row for kitchen doors, panelled doors and anything that needs a flat finish.
Effie MarlbrookPaper and colour
Hangs every roll that goes up, matches heritage colours, and keeps the file of what went where going back to 1991.
Stan TunnicliffeExteriors, 26 years with us
Not a Marlbrook, and the only one of us who enjoys stripping a sash window in February.
Sixteen miles out, and not a mile further.
Past that we would be charging you for the van and the hour we spend in it, and we would rather give you the name of a good firm out that way. We have two we send people to.
Wraybury
Home. The yard is the old bakehouse unit on Saltbox Row.
Netherstow
4 miles. Gorse Lane and the cottages along the green.
Clayhanger
7 miles. A lot of render out that way, so a lot of masonry work.
Brackwood
9 miles. Mostly 1930s semis, mostly exteriors.
Ferneley
11 miles. Two streets of sash windows that keep Stan busy.
Oldbarrow
12 miles. Farmhouses, and the Ivyhouse Farm exterior every twenty years.
Sowerby Cross
14 miles. We ask for a full week there rather than day trips.
Harnett Hill
16 miles, and that is as far as we go.
What people say the second time they book us.
Sample reviews, for illustration
“They painted this house for the family before us, and for that family’s parents before that. Ivor knew which window had been rebuilt because he was the one who rebuilt it in 2009.”
“I had three quotes. Two of them were a page. Marlbrook’s was four pages and listed the filling and the priming separately, and it was not the cheapest. It was obvious which one to take.”
“Effie hung a heavy Victorian paper in the dining room that two other firms told me could not be done in that alcove. She did it in a day and a half and the pattern matches at the corner.”
From the knock on the door to the ladders coming down
1Ivor comes and looks at it
About forty-five minutes. He measures, opens a window to see how the sashes run, and puts a damp meter on anything suspicious. No charge, and he will tell you at the door if a room does not need doing yet.
2You get it in writing, itemised
Three or four pages, room by room, with the prep steps listed and the paint named. The insurance certificate comes attached. Valid for 90 days and the price does not move once you accept it.
3We start on the day we said
Usually two weeks out. Two of us on an interior, three on an exterior, and the same faces every morning. You get told the night before if weather is going to change the plan.
Asked at the front door, most weeks
If yours is not here, ring Ivor. He answers his own phone between jobs and he will tell you if you do not need us.
Do you use subcontractors when you get busy?
No. There are four of us and that is the ceiling on what we can take. When the diary is full we say so and give you a date, or we give you the name of another firm we would use ourselves.
How long does a three-bed exterior take?
Twelve to fourteen working days with two painters, weather allowing. Rain adds days and we do not charge for them. We work exteriors April to October and we will not start one in November to fill a gap.
Can we stay in the house while you paint?
Nearly always. Interior paints are water-based and low odour, so a room is usable the night we finish it. We work one or two rooms at a time so you are never without a kitchen or a bathroom.
Will you do one room, or is there a minimum?
One room is fine. The minimum charge is $520, which is the average bedroom price, so a small cloakroom on its own costs the same as a bedroom. Most people add it to a bigger job instead.
Who buys the paint, and what happens to what is left?
We buy it at trade and pass on the trade price, itemised. Leftovers stay with you, labelled with the room and the colour code, and we keep the codes on file so a touch up in ten years matches.
What if I hate the colour once it is on the wall?
That is what the three sample patches are for, and it is why we leave them two days before you decide. If you change your mind after we have started, we recoat at the cost of the paint plus a day.
Tell us what needs painting. Ivor rings back the same day.
He will book a look at the job, usually within four days. The visit takes about forty-five minutes, costs nothing, and you get the itemised price by email within two working days of it.
- Itemised room by room, with the prep steps and the paint named
- Insurance certificate attached, price held for 90 days
- A start date in writing, normally two weeks out