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...

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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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)...
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As an experiment, I've made this entire post into a Pinterest graphic. 

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

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It was the National Painting and Decorating Show on the 15^th and 16^th 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...

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