Little Akaloa.

The brief.

The owners wanted the house refreshed end-to-end: a full exterior repaint over weatherboard and detailing that had taken a decade of Banks Peninsula weather, and a full interior repaint to bring colour and finish back to the standard the architecture asked for. The starting condition was not poor, just tired. Coats that had served their fifteen years. End-grain that had begun to drink. Interior walls that had carried family life and showed it.

Constraints were three. First, the location: every coat, every tin, every piece of scaffolding had to come in over the hill on a schedule that respected the rural drive. Second, the substrate variety: the build combined weatherboard, cedar detailing, and modern plaster sections, and each wanted a different system. Third, the colour: the owners wanted a palette that would hold against the landscape rather than fight it. The light off the harbour is not kind to the wrong white.

The work.

We walked the house twice before specifying anything. The first walk was about scope and condition: what we could see, what we could not, what the prep depth would need to be at the worst elevations. The second walk was about colour: samples on the actual cladding in morning and afternoon light, the conversation about how the house reads from across the bay, the conversation about how it reads from inside the kitchen looking out.

The exterior system was specified to the exposure. South and west elevations received the deepest prep: wash, scrape, prime bare timber, seal end-grain, two coats over. Cedar details were stained to a system selected for the cladding and the alpine-adjacent sun the peninsula gets in summer. Hand-cut detail at architraves, downpipes, and the junctions where weatherboard met plaster. Where the prep revealed timber that had moved past coating, we replaced and re-detailed before painting. Daily site notes, daily clean-down, daily walk-through with whoever was on the property.

The interior was sequenced room by room so the family could keep using most of the house. Sheets down before the team started. Skirtings and reveals masked and hand-cut. Walls cut in, rolled, and back-cut. Ceilings rolled and lit from low angle to check for the small wobbles that show only at certain times of the day. The colour conversation continued through the project: we changed two rooms once the first coat went on and the owners could see how the chosen white moved through the day. That is part of the work, not an inconvenience to manage around.

The scheduling around the peninsula commute mattered. Crews were on-site at consistent hours, the same faces every morning. Materials, sheets, and ladders came over in the planned trips, not in scattered ones. When weather forced a delay, the owners heard from us before the morning was out.

The finish.

The exterior reads clean from across the bay. The hand-cut detail holds up at close inspection. Inside, the house carries the same light it did before, but the walls now answer it properly. The white in the kitchen settles into the cabinetry. The bedroom palette holds against the afternoon. The owners report no surprises.

The repaint is meant to last fifteen years. The systems are specified to the exposure, the prep depth was right, and the call-back inspection at twelve months is already booked.