The name is the whole idea.

A great deal of what gets torn out of houses does not need to be. Kitchen cabinets with solid carcasses get skipped because the finish is dated. Original panelled doors get replaced with hollow-core because the paint has failed. Oak trim from the 1920s gets covered because stripping it is slow.

In almost every one of those cases the underlying material is better than what would replace it. What has actually failed is the finish — a few thousandths of an inch of coating on the outside of something perfectly sound.

That is the work we set up to do. Not just painting, though we do plenty of that, but the fine finishing that brings a surface back rather than covering it over: sprayed doors, refinished cabinets, stripped and re-stained millwork, furniture that gets another few decades instead of a skip.

Why we spray

Walls should be rolled. But doors, cabinet fronts, trim and furniture are all looked at from close range, and a brush leaves a texture you cannot unsee once you have noticed it — ridges running with the stroke, an uneven sheen where the coat dried thicker, loaded paint in the corners of a moulding.

Spraying puts down a continuous film instead of a series of strokes. It takes considerably more masking, containment and setup, which is exactly why it gets skipped. It is also the difference between a door that looks painted and a door that looks finished.

How we run a job

Three commitments, and they are the ones we would want from a contractor in our own house.

You get a fixed price in writing. Itemised, showing what is included and what products we are using. The figure you approve is the figure you pay, unless you ask for more work.

You get your house back every evening. Tools, sheets and materials cleared daily, not at the end of the job. Floors covered properly before anything starts, not after the first spill.

You deal with one person throughout. From the walkthrough to the final check, the same person owns your project. You are never re-explaining what you asked for to somebody who was not there.

What we will tell you not to do

There is work we turn down or talk people out of, and it is worth being upfront about that. We will tell you when a kitchen is too far gone to refinish, when timber under paint is not worth the hours it would take to strip, when an exterior really should wait for spring rather than being rushed into November, and when what you actually need is a carpenter.

A finish applied over a problem is a finish that fails, and the failure has our name on it. We would rather lose the job than take that on.