Choosing exterior, sash and heritage coatings

The elevation is three specifications, not one colour

People ask for the front of the house to be painted. On a pre-1919 street that sentence covers at least three materials. Render or stucco is a masonry coating. The sash or casement is timber joinery with cords, weights, putty and a glazing line. Lime plaster inside a reveal, a distemper ceiling seen from the pavement through the glass, or a limewash on an older garden wall can be a breathable coating rather than a masonry paint. This hub separates exterior painting, sash window restoration and heritage coatings so a quotation can name each one.

Exterior painting is the page for render, stucco, previously painted masonry, fascias, sills, railings and the broad weather face of the building. It includes the access conversation: scaffold or tower, and the line in the quotation that carries that access. Sash window restoration is the page when the frames themselves are the job: rotten timber, broken cords, weights that no longer balance, failed putty, draughts at the meeting rail. Painting the outside of a sound sash can sit inside an exterior decoration. Rebuilding how the sash runs is the restoration page. Heritage coatings are the page when the product has to stay vapour-open: limewash, casein or soft distemper, and a mineral silicate only where the facade is sound and compatible.

Mixing the three into "exterior redecoration" is how a stucco crack and a seized sash get the same tin. Roman cement and lime stucco on Fitzjohn's Avenue, Frognal and Highgate West Hill move. A hard film over a crack that was never opened comes back as the same crack. A sash that is over-coated on the meeting rail will not close, whether the masonry colour was perfect. A lime wall that receives a vinyl coating holds water. The pages exist so those failures are specified apart.

Consent, brick and weather sit beside the coating

Camden conservation areas at Hampstead, Redington and Frognal, Belsize, Fitzjohn's and Netherhall, and South Hill Park, often with an Article 4 Direction, control what changes on the street. The Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust in Barnet expects external colour and joinery to be settled before they are seen from the road. Listed building consent is a separate permission and can reach the frames and the plaster, not only the paint colour. None of the three services applies for those permissions on your behalf as a hidden extra. The specification should still be readable after the answer comes back, including the possibility that unpainted London stock brick on Church Row, Flask Walk or Well Walk stays unpainted.

Previously painted brick is not the same decision as bare stock. The existing film is tested, loose material comes off, and the next system is chosen for adhesion and for vapour. Bare stock that has never been coated should usually be left. A heritage coating does not unlock a planning refusal, and an exterior masonry paint does not either. Say which brick you have before you compare a colour chart.

Weather is a programme fact. Exterior coatings need a background that is not frozen or saturated, and a forecast that lets the film form. Sash work can often continue inside a workshop spell once the sash is out, but the opening has to be secure and the putty has to cure. Limewash and mineral systems are thinner coats with their own wet edge and their own temperature limits. A single week in the diary is rarely honest for all three at once on a tall elevation. Access, drying and consent are why the survey exists.

Which page matches the thing that is failing

If the render is stained, cracked or holding a failed coating, start with exterior painting. If the windows rattle, stick, rot at the cill or show daylight at the meeting rail, start with sash window restoration. If someone has proposed a standard emulsion or a plastic masonry paint for lime plaster, a distemper ceiling or a facade that must breathe, start with heritage coatings. A house on Downshire Hill or in the Suburb can need all three in one winter. They are still three scopes, with three preparations, and the quotation should show them as separate lines so you can defer one without confusing the price of the others.

Read the service page for the craft you have identified. The conservation guide sets out the consent background those streets share. Interior decoration of the rooms behind the elevation is the room decoration hub, not this one. The written quotation follows a look at the actual facade, the frames and the substrates.