Woden
Woden was Canberra’s first town centre outside Civic, and the houses around it went up through the 1960s and 1970s. Tony and Tyson paint those houses. The apartments and the common areas around the town centre are not work they take.
The district
Hughes, Curtin, Garran, Lyons and Chifley are the older end. A typical house there is brick veneer, single storey, timber windows, a low tile roof, and the original government joinery still under the paint. Pearce, Torrens and Mawson followed through the 1970s. Farrer and Isaacs are later. Isaacs climbs the hill and is often two storeys. O’Malley is the larger-block end of the district, and part of it was set aside as a diplomatic estate.
Part of Curtin was laid out on Radburn lines: the living side of the house faces a path and a park, and the car arrives at the back. That changes access. The walls to be painted are not always the walls you can drive a ladder to.
Hughes sits against Red Hill. Some of those houses were designed so the brick and the timber stayed visible. Painting over that is a decision, not the default. Phillip is the town centre: offices, the interchange, Westfield, and a lot of apartments. For us, Phillip means the houses on its edges.
Doors, architraves and skirtings in the 1960s houses were usually oil enamel. It has often been painted again with something that does not love it. Whether the next coat will hold is the question, and it is answered by looking, not by the colour card.
On most of these exteriors the brick was never the thing that needed paint. Windows, fascias and barges were. Exterior repaints follow the surface that is actually failing.
Woden houses change hands steadily. The rooms that show up in the photographs are the ones worth doing, on a date that suits the campaign. Pre-sale painting is that scope, not a promise about the sale price.
O’Malley and parts of Isaacs are simply bigger: more elevation, more trim, sometimes a steeper block. The work is still house painting. The quote is longer because the surfaces are.
Where the houses are
Curtin, Hughes, Garran, Lyons, Chifley, Pearce, Torrens, Mawson, Farrer, Isaacs, O’Malley, and the houses at the edge of Phillip. If the job is a unit block, a body corporate stair or a shopfront, it is outside what we do.
Interiors of the older houses are the same family of work as interior painting elsewhere in Canberra: walls and ceilings, then the joinery, in that order, because the joinery is where a rushed coat shows.
Other notes: Molonglo and Denman Prospect, Weston Creek, Belconnen, Inner North, and the Canberra painters overview.
If the house faces a park rather than the street, say so. It changes how we get to the walls.