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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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...

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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 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...
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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...
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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...
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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....

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...
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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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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...

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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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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...
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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: 
 


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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...
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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...

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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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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...
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