Colonial Painting & Decorating Service

17/09/2026

Friday:
“Righto boys, let’s get into it. We’ll have this knocked over by lunch.”
Monday:
“……what d’ya reckon, boys? Three days?”

Estimating. An exact science. 😏

17/09/2026

Where's Scott?
Somewhere between Cains to Cape York.
Speak soon...not to soon.

16/09/2026

One of the worst ceilings I’ve seen…
…this week.
Maybe this month.
Paint peeling off in sheets and taking the previous coating with it.
Where’s the sealer/binder?
A finish coat is only as good as what it’s stuck to. Skip the boring bit underneath and eventually the ceiling starts answering the question for you.
Spoiler: another two coats of ceiling flat aren’t fixing this one.

15/09/2026

Lovely day to get covered in some TSP.
When you know, you know. 😏 🌧🧹

15/09/2026

What’s the orange?
It’s not the paint colour, and it’s not necessarily rust.
Moisture moving through masonry can carry minerals and other contaminants with it. When that moisture reaches the surface and evaporates, it can leave some pretty distinctive staining behind.
The interesting part isn’t covering the stain. It’s working out what’s causing it, where the moisture is coming from, and what needs to be done to stop it coming back.
And yes — it can be rectified. Identify the moisture source, address the underlying defect, repair the affected substrate, then specify a coating system suited to what the wall is actually dealing with.
Walls talk. Painters just spend an unreasonable amount of time staring at them.

13/09/2026

“This is not the blue you’re looking for…” 🔵😂

Turns out there’s a difference between French Blue and Porter’s French Blue.
One looks bold and rich.
The other looks like someone mixed blue into leftover French Grey and hoped for the best.
Painters’ 1st world problems!
spending more time colour matching names than actually painting sometimes.

10/09/2026

09/09/2026

Five others turned it down. We found a way.
Access was the problem on this one.
Steep roof, awkward dormers and very little margin for getting it wrong. Five others had already looked at the job and decided it wasn’t for them.
That doesn’t mean the work can’t be done. It means the access method needs to be properly thought through.
With the right equipment, planning and safe system of work, the difficult areas became reachable and the job became achievable.
Sometimes painting is the easy part.
Finding a safe, practical way to get the painter there is the real job.
Colonial Painting — We don’t cut corners. We paint them.

08/09/2026

A customer see's a wall where the colour has faded.

We see a little more.

Water ingress and staining that needs to be understood before it’s coated.

Mineral leaching and efflorescence — and the question of where that moisture is coming from.

Signs of rising damp.

Drumming and delaminating render that needs to be identified and repaired, not simply painted over.

A steep, landscaped site that needs a safe and practical access plan before work begins.

And then there’s the environment.

This home sits right on the coast, exposed to salt, moisture, wind and some fairly relentless Australian sun. Whatever coating system goes back onto it needs to do considerably more than look good on completion day.

That means considering substrate condition, preparation, adhesion, moisture movement and compatibility — then specifying a coating system with the appropriate build and dry film thickness for the conditions it has to survive.

Because there’s not much point putting a beautiful new finish over a problem that’s still happening underneath it.

Sometimes quoting a painting project is about choosing a colour and counting square metres.

Sometimes it’s about figuring out **why the wall looks like this in the first place.**

And another challenge altogether, keeping the crew focused on the wall instead of the waves, the occasional whale breaching offshore & the tanned swimsuited distractions.

We don’t cut corners — we paint them!