Weatherboard painting in Melbourne

Why a weatherboard house costs more than a rendered one

Weatherboards have more edges to prepare and paint than a flat rendered wall of the same area.

A rendered wall is a flat sheet you can roll. A weatherboard wall of the same area is forty or fifty separate boards, each with a top edge, a bottom lip and two ends, and every one of those edges is brush work. Add the gaps where boards meet at a corner stop, and the underside of each lap that a roller can't reach. We consider the number and condition of the boards when quoting.

Common weatherboard repairs

End grain. The cut ends of a board suck up water like a straw, which is why rot almost always starts at a corner, at a join, or where a board dies into a window frame. It's invisible until you push a screwdriver into it. Sealing cut ends helps protect the timber from moisture.

Movement. Timber swells in a wet Melbourne winter and shrinks back through summer. A hard, brittle coating splits along the lap lines. A flexible exterior system moves with the boards instead of cracking across them.

Nail sickness. Old galvanised nails rust and bleed a brown stain down the board. Painting over it just gives you a fresh wall with the same stain coming back through in eighteen months. They need punching, spot-priming with a rust-blocking primer, then filling.

Cupping and splitting. A board that's curled away from the frame won't sit flat again. It gets replaced. On a Californian bungalow or an Edwardian it's usually a handful of boards, not a wall.

The boards you're likely to have

Baltic pine and hardwood on anything Victorian, Edwardian or interwar. Original, often a hundred years old, and worth repairing instead of replacing, because the timber is better than anything you can buy now.

Cedar on mid-century and 1970s places. It's soft, it holds oil-based stains well, and it hates being sealed under a heavy film if there's any moisture behind it.

Fibre cement on anything newer, and on a lot of replacement boards. It doesn't rot and it doesn't move much, but the joints and the cut edges still need sealing, and older sheeting needs checking before anyone takes a sander to it.

Lead, on almost every inner-north weatherboard

If the house went up before 1971, assume there's lead paint under the later coats. On a weatherboard house it's usually everywhere: boards, window frames, eaves, the front fence.

We test before sanding, then work wet, sheet the ground so nothing lands in the garden beds, run a vacuum sander instead of an open one, and take the waste away with us. No dry sanding, no heat gun. It goes in the quote up front, not as a variation once the first board is open. There's more on the exterior painting page.

What affects the price

• How many boards need replacing. Nobody can tell from the footpath, and it's the biggest single variable
• Whether it's single or double storey, and whether a scaffold is needed rather than ladders
• How much of the old coating is still stuck down. A house that's flaking to bare timber is a strip, not a repaint
• Fretwork, window sashes, verandah posts and lacework, all of which are slow brush work
• Lead, if the house is pre-1971

What to ask any painter

Ask whether replacing rotten boards is in the price or a variation, and at what rate per board. Ask whether they're sealing cut ends on every new board. Ask what happens to rusted nail heads. Ask how they're handling lead if the place is old enough. And ask how many coats go on the south side, which gets the least sun, holds the most moisture and grows the most mould.

If the roof needs doing too, it's worth pricing at the same time, while the access is there. More on the roof painting page. If you're in Brunswick, Coburg or Northcote, the housing stock notes on the Brunswick page go into what we see locally.

Preparation and aftercare

Read our painting preparation and aftercare guide for arranging access, protecting belongings and checking when the painted surface is ready to use or clean.