The surfaces that make a home.

Choosing a service from the surface you want to change

The services index is a way to name the work, not a menu that has to be taken in full. Start with the surface in front of you. Walls and ceilings in a lived-in room belong with interior painting. A stucco elevation, a bare-brick question or a failure in an existing external coating belongs with exterior painting. Doors, sash windows, shutters, panelling and fitted cupboards belong with joinery, even when they sit inside a room that is also being painted. A patterned or textured wallcovering is its own scope, because the preparation, the order and the batch record differ from a painted wall. A period-home page is for the brief that has to say what will be kept. Colour planning is for the decisions that connect those surfaces, inside or outside, before products are ordered. Primrose Hill, in the London Borough of Camden, is the centre of that brief, across the NW1 and NW3 streets this site describes. Belsize Park, Chalk Farm and Camden Town can be discussed as well, but the building and the surface still decide which service page is the right one to read. Where two services meet, keep them as separate lines in one enquiry.

When one home needs more than one of these scopes

A Regent’s Park Road villa, a Chalcot terrace house or a flat behind Gloucester Avenue may need a ceiling, a run of sash windows and a wallcovering in the same season. The useful way to combine services is to write one list and mark which page’s questions apply to each line. Interior painting asks about stains, plaster and the order of occupied rooms. Exterior painting asks about the existing coating, the material that should stay exposed, access and any consent question. Joinery asks which leaves, frames and ironmongery are included. Wallpaper asks for the product reference, the repeat and the wall the pattern should start from. Period-home decoration asks which mouldings and earlier finishes are excluded. Colour planning asks for the samples to be judged together. Put repairs that are not decoration on a separate line, and name who will confirm that a surface is ready. A combined brief is easier to price when each line has a condition, a boundary and a product direction, and when the sequence between them is stated. Where paper meets freshly painted joinery, show that order in the brief. Do the same where joinery is finished before a wall is cut in.

Sources: Camden: Primrose Hill Conservation Area statement

From these pages to one written enquiry

Read the service page that matches the largest part of the work, then take only the extra questions you need from the others. For an interior, send a room list, ceiling heights if you know them, and photographs of corners, reveals and any mark you want understood. For an exterior, send the present finish, the proposed change, and separate photographs of stucco, brick, joinery and railings. For joinery, name the elements and say whether handles and hinges stay on or come off. For a wallcovering, send the manufacturer’s reference and hanging instructions if you already have them. For a period interior, mark what must not be stripped or filled. For colour, say which surfaces are still undecided. Add the address, how the building is reached, and any instruction from a freeholder or managing agent. Photographs can follow by email or WhatsApp. The form on this site takes a written message. An enquiry is a request to discuss scope and availability. It does not reserve a date, and it does not stand in for a permission the building may require. Keep later choices, including an approved sample and any surface taken out of the scope, with the same note.