Showing Tag: "in" (Show all posts)

Interview with Ian Frost - Regional President of the Painting and Decorating Association

Posted by Charles Budd on Sunday, January 29, 2017, In : Interview 


Chris Kerfoot (who's superb decorating work you can find here: www.ChrisKerfootPainterandDecorator.co.uk)  founder of the Brothers of the Brush decorators' forum on Facebook asked me whether I could do a quick interview with Ian Frost, Regional President of the Painting and Decorating Association.


Chris had seen the quick video interviews I’d done at the National Painting and Decorating Show and asked whether I could do a slightly longer version for the group. He and Ian, who are both sterl...


Continue reading ...
 

Repairing exterior timber - faux Tudor beams

Posted by Charles Budd on Monday, August 15, 2016,
Until the scaffolding was up on this semi-detached house in Stratford upon Avon, it was difficult to see the state of the faux Tudor timber beams at the top of the house. Once I got up onto the scaffolding, and poked my finger into the timber, I got rather a shock. It was not only rotten, but just thin planking. 



Taking a closer look at the paint, you can see it was in very poor shape. Nearly all the paint would have to come off.



It was time to get my professional Finnish and German sanding equ...

Continue reading ...
 

How To Repair Cast Iron Guttering

Posted by Charles Budd on Saturday, July 23, 2016,


This piece of guttering was only just hanging on.
Imagine if it had dropped on someone's head.


Here’s the ‘executive summary' of the detailed process below.
  1. Clean off all flaky gubbins*. (*Technical term.)
  2. Glue the pieces of cast iron together using Repair Care resins.
  3. Paint your guttering. 
  4. Stand back with a cup of tea and gaze in awe at your repair. 


If you really want to know the ins and outs, brew yourself your favourite beverage, sneak a couple of ginger nuts out of the biscuit tin...


Continue reading ...
 

Vague Advice for a North Facing Dining Room

Posted by Charles Budd on Sunday, April 10, 2016,
Someone I've been advising asked me a question about what colour to paint his north facing dining room. I've never met him or seen his house. He told me he wanted to use Little Greene paint - a great choice as it's one of the best quality British paint brands out there.

I emailed him a quick, and necessarily vague reply, which included the following paragraph:


"Choosing colour is the most subjective part of the job. It depends what kind of mood you want in the dining room.

Something bright and ...

Continue reading ...
 

Festool sanders - worth the money

Posted by Charles Budd on Monday, August 24, 2015,
I won't drone on for too long about how much I love my sanding equipment. I'm sure you've better things to do. I've got two Mirka sanders for broad areas - the Ceros and Deros, and I've got two Festool sanders - the RO90 for exterior timber work, and my RTS400, mainly for interior woodwork, and for finishing off exterior woodwork. 

These sanders make a MASSIVE difference to my decorating. Sorry for the caps, but I can't emphasise how useful they are. Not only can I sand much quicker with these...
Continue reading ...
 

Decorators in Stratford upon Avon

Posted by Charles Budd on Tuesday, July 28, 2015,
I love decorating in Stratford upon Avon. It's an old town, with plenty of old buildings, and that's what I love the most. Don't get me wrong, I love the simplicity of decorating relatively newer buildings, as usually the plaster is flat, the woodwork is simpler, and they are often faster to do, but I do love the challenges and details of being part of the renovation process of old buildings. And although Stratford upon Avon is a relatively small town, it provides enough work for at least a h...
Continue reading ...
 

Rustoleum Chalky Finish Furniture Paint - and more reviews

Posted by Charles Budd on Sunday, June 7, 2015,
Some of you may know that I'm one of the reviewers on the Painting and Decorating Product Reviews website. It's a relatively new site but already proving popular and reviews are now coming in thick and fast. 


Over the next few weeks the team of professional decorators who do the reviews will be adding new products to review, as well as lending their experienced eye to review products already on the site. 

The plan is to provide both professional decorators and DIY decorators alike with a comple...
Continue reading ...
 

Patience and Detail - Victorian Cast Iron Lattice Windows

Posted by Charles Budd on Saturday, November 15, 2014,

Several ideas have been spinning around my head due to a particular job this year. A job of patience, intricacy, detail, more patience, thought, analysis, change of technique, more patience, evolution of technique....


Patience and Detail - needed with cast iron lattice windows.

Those of you who know me know I'm a pretty patient chap. Earlier in my working life I was a care worker for adults with learning difficulties and challenging behaviour - that needed oodles of patience, and empathy too. I...
Continue reading ...
 

Zinsser Peelstop and Zinsser Coverstain - repairing water damage to walls and ceilings

Posted by Charles Budd on Tuesday, October 21, 2014,

I'm often asked to repair walls and ceilings which have had water damage from leaks. It really helps to know what products to use to sort them out. 


Zinsser Peel Stop

On a recent job this summer, I was asked to repair some peeling and cracking paint by a kitchen hob. 



All the loose paint was scraped off. And all the cracks were 'raked out' (this gives filler something decent to grab onto). Then one coat of Zinsser Peel Stop water-borne primer was brushed onto the whole area, taking care to brush...
Continue reading ...
 

Kinky Vintage Naughty Noir by Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen

Posted by Charles Budd on Monday, July 7, 2014,


I was going through my photos this evening and came across some snaps of a job I did for a neighbour a few months back. They'd asked me to hang a couple of feature walls in their sitting room with a black flock wallpaper by Graham and Brown, in the Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen design 'Kinky Vintage Naughty Noir'. Ooookay! It was fairly straightforward to put up, once the walls were properly prepared. This flock wallpaper is embossed with a fuzzy, almost hairy black fabric - it brushes off very ea...

Continue reading ...
 

Bedec Barn Paint... not just for barns!

Posted by Charles Budd on Tuesday, July 1, 2014,
Bedec are a small, British paint company. Many of you may not have heard of Bedec, but it has a damn useful range of paints. I'll blog more about some of their paints in other blogs, but for the time, here's one on their brilliant Barn Paint... and no, it's not just for barns! 

You can buy it online at Allfinishes here: https://allfinishes.co.uk/bedec-barn-paint

The Shed
I got an old 8ft by 8ft shed from Freecycle. It was stained brown, patchy brown, all over. It looked like a big, ugly, brown l...
Continue reading ...
 

Complete Kitchen Repaint

Posted by Charles Budd on Monday, January 27, 2014,
Two of my favourite customers, Sally and Andy, asked me to do a complete repaint of their 9 year old bespoke kitchen in their Warwickshire cottage. It's always a pleasure to work for them, but this project was a bit special as it's such a lovely room! 

Most areas were in reasonable decorative repair, but as it's an old house, quite a few cracks needed filling - particularly along the oak beams, and all the kitchen cabinets needed a lot of sanding before moving onto priming and painting. I love...
Continue reading ...
 

A sanding demonstration - getting perfectionist!

Posted by Charles Budd on Sunday, January 26, 2014,
You can see an example of the care I take in the preparation work I do in this video. 

It's one of about 35 kitchen doors I painted recently in a lovely bespoke kitchen in Warwickshire.

Video: Sanding using Festool RO90, Festool Stickfix and Handipad.
Continue reading ...
 

Stripping paint off hinges, the easy way

Posted by Charles Budd on Thursday, December 12, 2013,
I'm repainting a lovely bespoke kitchen at the moment, and all the cabinet hinges had paint on them. I cleaned off a few, but it was taking quite a long time, and I had dozens! 

Putting the little grey cells into action, I put all the hinges and screws from the cabinet doors into a large freezer bag, gave them 5 squirts of Multi Task Multi-Purpose Cleaner, moved them about in the bag a bit, sealed and left for a few hours. I was told by Andy from Eco Solutions in Somerset (who make Multi Task)...
Continue reading ...
 

Papering masterclass with Ron Taylor

Posted by Charles Budd on Thursday, November 7, 2013,

I just thought I'd share a few photos of a recent job. Sorry about the quality of the photos!

Some months ago I was approached to refresh a neutral and tired-looking sitting room. I was too busy at the time, but gave a quote which was accepted and the work booked in for autumn half-term while the house was empty. 

The specification was to repair some deep holes in plaster caused by redundant light fittings, general preparation work, repaint ceiling, 3 walls, woodwork and fireplace, and pape...


Continue reading ...
 

Durable repair to antique window

Posted by Charles Budd on Tuesday, October 15, 2013,
As an experiment, I've made this entire post into a Pinterest graphic. 

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/155796468333066160/

Continue reading ...
 

If paint brushes were cars... or 'how to choose a paint brush'.

Posted by Charles Budd on Wednesday, September 18, 2013,


Choosing the right paint brush for a decorating job can affect the quality of the finish, how easy it is to apply the paint, as well as how quickly you can get the job done. It's a bit like choosing a car - there's no one vehicle that's perfect for every job, so how do you choose what's best for you?


Firstly - do you REALLY like using a crap brush?

If you enjoy picking bristles out of your paint every two minutes, or dipping your brush for every 3 inches of painting, or struggling to paint a cr...

Continue reading ...
 

Homestrip - on brick

Posted by Charles Budd on Sunday, July 7, 2013,
I'm currently painting the exterior of a customer's house. Most of the brick is unpainted, except a couple of square metres where there was a lean-to in the past. I asked my customer whether he'd like me to strip the paint off, to even it all up. He said it was a good idea. 

There were several layers of gloss paint on the brick - and I knew to sand it all off would take a long time, as well as quite a lot of Abranet (the mesh sanding 'paper' I use which enables most of the dust produced by san...
Continue reading ...
 

Homestrip - a safer way to strip paint

Posted by Charles Budd on Saturday, May 4, 2013,

 
I was asked by a regular customer to renovate a large dresser unit in her kitchen. It had been painted many times before, and the previous decorator had been asked to make it look like the rest of the natural wood kitchen. He'd decided to paint it brown, so it looked 'kind of like wood'. It didn't! The only way to really get the dresser to look like natural wood, without a huge effort of painting natural grains on it, was to completely strip it.  
 
This particular customer has a low tolerance...

Continue reading ...
 

Undoing the previous decorator's job

Posted by Charles Budd on Saturday, March 2, 2013,
When starting a new decorating job we first mask and cover surfaces we're not decorating, then get on with the preparation work. There will almost always be cracks and dents to be filled, old paint to be sanded... but what often frustrates us is having to undo the previous decorator's job! One of our maxims is 'do the job well, and it'll be a lot easier to decorate next time'. So why, oh why do some decorators do things like this: 
 

Yes, they had filled ONTO the switch with caulk, and then pai...

Continue reading ...
 

Painting and Decorating Show 2012

Posted by Charles Budd on Monday, December 10, 2012,
For two days in November, the Ricoh Arena in Coventry became an Ali Baba's Cavern of Delights for decorators. There were the usual suspects - Dulux, Crown, Johnstone's-Leyland, Purdy... but also lesser-known brands to some perhaps, like Mythic, Owatrol, Axus, Olfa, Wooster... and new innovations like Ladder-Limb and Handi-Pad. I went on just one day, for 6 hours, and it was nowhere near enough time to see everything and talk to everyone I wanted to. 

As it was I talked to a couple of dozen dec...
Continue reading ...
 

Union Jack Coffee Table using Annie Sloan Paints

Posted by Charles Budd on Monday, June 18, 2012,

I like to blame as much as I can on Andy Crichton, yes, him off the Traditional Painter website. 

It's his fault that I've spent lots of time practicing how to use Toupret skim fillers to get a finish smoother than an baby's bottom on walls and ceilings. 

It's his fault that I've had to spend delicious hours experimenting with Little Greene paints to get the most beautiful eggshell finish to woodwork (they're much better than that other 'heritage' brand that most people rave about).

And es...


Continue reading ...
 

The National Painting and Decorating Show - the best bits

Posted by Charles Budd on Friday, November 25, 2011,

It was the National Painting and Decorating Show on the 15th and 16th of November. You knew that didn’t you? Well it was. I went. It was fascinating. So read on.

Thanks to the Sat Nav I ended up in Tesco’s carpark, scrambled down a muddy bank, under the train tracks, past a discarded trolley, and at last into the doughnut. (The Ricoh Arena, Coventry)

As happens with these things, as soon as I walked into the exhibition hall I was turned into The Prisoner – barcoded, scanned and conge...


Continue reading ...
 

Overlap your paints for a crisp edge!

Posted by Charles Budd on Sunday, October 16, 2011,
How do you get a lovely, clean edge when you're painting? Well, good preparation is key (it's very difficult to paint a clean edge on a bumpy surface!). A steady hand helps. I don't have a particularly steady hand - but with concentration and technique I can get an edge which makes most of my customers ask how I did it! But one thing that really helps is to overlap your paints; for example, if you're painting a ceiling and walls - first do all your filling of cracks and dents, then paint your...
Continue reading ...
 
 

Tags

Categories