Pick a colour.
We do the rest.

A roof takes the worst of the West Coast year: salt air and the summer south-easter, then the winter north-westers coming straight off the sea. That is why the preparation carries the job. Loose and flaking coating is stripped back, rust is taken to sound metal and treated, bare patches are primed, and the colour goes on over the top.

Tile and fibre cement roofs are a different animal to steel. They drink the first coat, so they are sealed before any colour goes near them.

The bulk of the work. Outside walls are washed down, cracks are cut open and filled rather than skimmed over, and anything chalky gets bound before the topcoats go on. Inside, the fiddly part is the cutting in: clean lines where the wall meets the ceiling, the skirting and the door frames.

Furniture and floors are covered, and the edges are masked. A neat job is mostly about what happens before the roller comes out.

Concrete is porous and it holds oil, so a driveway is washed and degreased before anything else happens. Once it is dry, a floor coating goes down. That is a different product to wall paint: it has to take tyres turning on it, not just weather.

Same story for a stoep or a garage floor. The surface tells you which coating it needs.

Steel fails from the inside out, so rust is the whole job. It gets wire brushed or ground back to clean metal, treated, and primed before a topcoat goes anywhere near it. Skip that and the same brown streaks are back inside a season.

Gates and moving parts get done in a way that lets them close properly afterwards, which sounds obvious until someone paints a latch shut.

Timber moves. It swells in the wet and shrinks back in the heat, which is why a hard film cracks on it and a flexible finish does not. Grey, weathered boards are cleaned back first, because a coating over dead fibres lifts off with them.

The ends of posts and the bottom rail are where fences rot first, so they are worth the extra attention.

Sometimes the wall does not need paint, it needs a wash. Boundary walls on the shady side pick up green algae, paving goes black, and a roof collects a season of dust and leaf litter. A wash down takes years off the look of a place for a fraction of a repaint.

It is also the first step of most paint jobs. Coating over dirt is money thrown away.