The whole house. One job.

What one job buys you.

Four things that only exist when the whole property is quoted at once, and every one of them is about your calendar rather than about paint.

Start from the part you keep looking at.

Nobody thinks in service names. Find the thing that has been bothering you and follow it through, or ask for the lot and let us work out which is which.

• Hallways and stairs

  Where the house wears

  The surfaces every person and every bag touches on the way through. They date a house faster than any room does and they are usually the first thing anybody rings about.

• The walls themselves

  Cracks, holes, old joins

  Before any of it is a painting question it is a surface question. If the wall is not flat, the paint is going to point at it rather than cover it.

• One wall in paper

  Feature and lining

  The room where one wall is meant to do something different, and the rooms where somebody already tried. Worth seeing against the finished colours rather than a card.

• Weatherboards and trim

  Everything the weather gets

  Cladding, joinery, soffits and the bits of trim that are always first to go. Each elevation weathers at its own rate, so the north face and the south face are rarely in the same condition.

• The roof above it

  Where a repaint starts

  It goes first if it is going at all. Settling it decides the order of the whole outside.

• The deck and the fence

  The timber left outside

  The parts that need a run of dry weather rather than a date, so we slot them into the programme around everything else rather than promising a Tuesday.

Weeks of us in your house.

That is what a whole-house job actually is, and no photograph shows it. Daniel Fridd, who runs Parthenon Construction, has had Bevan working on his own sites.

What people ask about a whole house.

Six answers about scope, dates and living in it. Anything about a particular surface is answered properly on that surface's own page.

• Do I have to do all of it?

  No, and most people do not. The point of quoting the whole property is that you can see it, then choose. Plenty come back as the inside now and the outside next spring.

• How long does a house take?

  Weeks rather than days, and what decides it is how much surface repair is in the walls rather than how many rooms. That is why the number comes off the walk around rather than the phone. Inside and out together is usually planned across two seasons, because the outside takes the weather it is given.

• Can we live in it?

  Almost always, and we plan for it rather than tolerating it. We work a room or two at a time, sequence the kitchen and bathrooms so you are never without one, and put beds back the same day where we can. A couple of days are disruptive, and you are told which in advance.

• Who is actually in my house?

  Bevan Cochrane, who owns it, and Jordon McGregor, qualified. Nobody arrives who you have not met, and nothing goes to a subcontractor without being discussed.

• What do you need from me before you start?

  Colours decided, walls cleared of anything screwed into them, and a straight answer about which rooms cannot be out of action on which days.

• What happens to the furniture?

  To the middle and covered, or out of the room, depending what it is and what the room is getting. Anything you would rather nobody else handled, name it at the visit rather than on the morning.