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Parthenon Restoration & Decorating
022 615 5816

Cut in by hand. Left clean.

Interior painting across Christchurch. Rooms, hallways, ceilings, doors and joinery, with the surface made right before a lid comes off and the work run around the way you use the house.

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  • Owner operated
  • Christchurch
  • Part of the Parthenon family

The room you stopped looking at.

You stop noticing the marks for two years, and then one afternoon you see nothing else.

Usually it is a hallway, which takes every bag, every shoulder and every set of small hands in the house and shows all of it in one strip of wall at waist height. Sometimes a ceiling gone a different white to the one it started as. Sometimes a whole house, because you have just bought it and there is nothing in it yet.

What we cover is the inside of the building: walls, ceilings, hallways and stairwells, doors and frames, skirting, architraves, window reveals, kitchen and bathroom joinery, and the cupboards nobody mentions until the room around them is fresh. Where a wall needs stopping first, we do that rather than fill over it.

We plan the work around the house being lived in rather than emptied. If it will be empty for a stretch, say so and we run it that way. And a hallway is rarely just a hallway: doing it in one go costs less than three.

What happens before the paint

  • The rooms

    Walls, ceilings, halls and stairwells

  • The trim

    Doors, frames, skirting, architraves

  • The joinery

    Kitchen and bathroom cabinetry

  • While you live in it

    Furniture moved back the same day

Four surfaces, four different jobs.

A ceiling, a skirting board and a cupboard door are three different products and three different methods.

Walls and ceilings

Rolled, cut and laid off

Flat, even, and cut in by hand where they meet. A ceiling shows every roller mark because it is lit from its own plane, so it is laid off in one direction, wet edge to wet edge.

Doors and trim

Brushed or sprayed

Trim takes an enamel rather than a wall paint, because it is the surface people touch and it has to stand being wiped down. Doors come off their hinges onto trestles where the finish justifies it.

Kitchens and baths

Where steam collects

These two rooms defeat ordinary paint. Grease comes off before anything goes on, and the product is made for a room that fills with water twice a day. Miss either and it peels above the shower.

Stairwells and voids

Access, edges and height

The ones nobody wants. A double height stairwell is a scaffold problem before it is a painting problem, and the reason those walls stay scuffed for years is that reaching them safely is most of the work.

Filled, sanded, sealed. Then colour.

Inside a lived-in house the prep is everything in the room that is not the wall, and that is the half a finished photograph never shows.

Furniture out or into the middle and covered. Floors protected rather than sheeted with something that slides. Hardware off rather than cut around, into a labelled bag, back on at the end.

Then the surface. Washed where it is greasy, filled where it is dented, sanded back flat rather than until it looks flat. Every repair and bare patch sealed, because plasterboard and filler drink paint at different rates.

Then dust, which is what people remember. We sand with extraction where the room allows, and wipe the room down before anything is opened, because a fleck of grit in a wet wall is permanent.

And each evening it goes back to being a house. Tools out of the hallway, sheets folded, and a floor you can walk on in socks.

How a job runs

  • First

    Furniture out, floors protected

  • Then

    Hardware off, into a labelled bag

  • Then

    Washed, filled, sanded back flat

  • Then

    Every repair and bare patch sealed

  • Only then

    Swept down before a lid comes off

What is actually under the finish.

Only the top layer is visible once we leave. This is the order the rest of it goes on in, from the wall outwards.

  1. What is actually there

    Old paint behaves differently to bare material, and that difference is a fair number against a hopeful one. We look before we quote.

  2. Washed

    Nothing holds to a wall that has a kitchen on it.

  3. Filled and sanded back flat

    The boring half, and where a job is won or lost.

  4. Sealed

    Every repair and bare patch sealed, or the coats above soak in unevenly and the patch reads through the finish in the right light.

  5. Coats

    Considered, not counted. The wall decides that rather than a quote does.

How a job runs

You are living in it while we are in it.

The fear is almost never the finish. It is the days in between: strangers in the house, the good rug, the dog getting out, and nobody to ask.

It is Bevan Cochrane, who owns it, and Jordon McGregor, who is a qualified painter. The person who quoted the job is the person doing it.

We do not treat the house as a site. No front door propped open all afternoon, no radio, shoes off past the hallway, and doors shut behind us if you have a dog or a small child.

The last hour decides how it feels: hardware back on, furniture back where it was, floors clear, rubbish gone. Not tidied. Put back. And if something needs sorting afterwards, the person who did it comes back.

Who you get

  • Owner/Operator

    Bevan Cochrane, on the tools

  • Qualified Painter

    Jordon McGregor, alongside him

  • How it is staged

    One or two rooms at a time

  • The last hour

    Put back, not just tidied

The living end of a new build, raked white ceiling meeting plain walls above a log burner
An open plan kitchen and living room, walls and raked panelled ceiling painted off white, polished concrete floor

A raked ceiling, finished.

Interior painting, Christchurch

Two frames of the same room, which is enough. A raked plane is lit along its own surface, so it shows every join, every lap mark and every place a wet edge was allowed to go off.

View the full portfolio

The ones people ask inside the house.

Answered plainly, including the ones that usually get a shrug.

  • How long will you be in the house?

    It depends on the number of rooms, how much trim there is, and how much stopping the walls need, so the honest answer comes off the walk through. Either way you get dates before it starts and a call if they move.

  • Do I have to move out?

    No. We run most jobs around you, one or two rooms at a time, with the kitchen working and the beds back where they belong each evening.

  • How much furniture do I need to move?

    The small and the breakable, and anything you would rather nobody else handled. Everything else goes into the middle of the room, covered, and back the same day. If a wall unit has to come off, we agree that beforehand.

  • Is two coats always enough?

    Not always. Two is normal over a sound, sealed, similar colour. Dark to white, or a patchy repair, can take three. What is under it decides, and we work that out at the quote.

  • Can you paint over wallpaper?

    Sometimes, and usually a false economy. If the paper is sound, well stuck and not textured, we can seal and paint it. If it is lifting anywhere it will lift further once wet, and then you are stripping it with paint on it, which is worse than stripping it now.

  • What about the smell?

    Most interior work is waterborne now, so it is mild and gone in a day. Where an enamel is right for trim it will be stronger, so those rooms are ordered to air out before you need them back.

  • When is the cheapest time to do it?

    While the house is empty. Between tenants, between owners, or before you move in. No furniture to move, nobody to work around, every surface reachable. If that window exists, use it.

More questions

The finish, judged from a metre away.

Interior work is looked at closely, in daylight, by the people who live with it. Bevan paints inside the houses Parthenon Construction builds, and this is what Daniel Fridd makes of it.

“He's one of the best painters I've seen. Perfection. Takes proper care.”

Daniel Fridd, Parthenon Construction

About the business

Show us the room.

The room you keep walking past is the one to start with. We walk it before there is a number, because ten minutes in the hallway says more than a week of email.

Or ring 022 615 5816. There is no obligation either way and nobody will chase you.