Commercial / Education and Public Sector
Education and public sector. Work programmed around a calendar and a record.
Public work runs on calendars and records that do not yield. Schools and universities are timetabled to the academic year. Civic and heritage buildings carry a documented history that the repaint has to respect. A new-build needs to be ready for the first day of term, a refurbishment in a working campus has to happen between terms or after hours, and a listed building needs a contractor who will read what is already there before touching it.
Education work rewards contractors who plan around the calendar rather than against it. Heritage and public work rewards patience, sampling, and the willingness to slow down when the building asks us to. We bring both to the public sector, with the documentation an institutional facilities manager or a heritage advisor expects to see at audit.
Sector
What we do in education and public work
New-build institutional work.
Universities, polytechnics, schools, and early childhood facilities. Specified Resene systems on plasterboard, blockwork, exposed precast, steel, and timber joinery. Coordination with the head contractor's master programme and the institution's commissioning date.
Refurbishment in working campuses.
Repaints of corridors, classrooms, halls, libraries, and accommodation blocks scheduled into term breaks and holiday windows. Out-of-hours work where the brief requires it.
Halls of residence.
Multi-room repaint programmes scheduled to the turnover between academic years. Multi-crew capacity to compress a typical six-week programme into the available window.
Heritage repaint and restoration.
Listed and unlisted heritage buildings, public works, civic buildings, churches, halls, and villas of significance. We work to heritage consent conditions where they apply and document the work to the standard the consent expects.
Sampling and colour matching to historic record.
Paint sampling on the substrate to identify previous colour layers. Cross-reference with historic photography, archive records, and any specifier-approved colour standard. We propose the match in writing, with a physical sample on a discrete area of the building.
Substrate-appropriate preparation.
Old timber, plaster, render, and joinery each need a different prep. Aggressive sanding on hundred-year-old detail is the wrong answer. We hand-prepare where the work warrants it and use the least invasive method that still gives the coating system a sound surface to bond to. Reversible techniques where the spec allows them.
Institutional and public-sector procurement.
Tendered work to MBIE and public-sector standards. Documentation to match: site reports, health-and-safety pack, induction records, materials data sheets.
Sector
How we work in education and public work
Programme around term breaks.
We map the institution's academic calendar against the painting programme before we commit to a date. Two-week breaks are tight. Six-week summer breaks open up larger scopes.
Heritage consent compliance.
Where the building sits within a heritage overlay, we work to the conditions of the consent and document the work accordingly. Coat-by-coat photography. Material specifications retained in the site pack. Variations approved before they happen, with the heritage advisor in the loop.
Sampling first.
Colour, finish, and substrate samples on site before any committed work. The heritage architect, the asset owner, or the trust signs off the sample before the system rolls out across the building.
Dust and odour control.
Low-VOC Resene Eco.Decorator ranges specified where the work touches occupied teaching or accommodation spaces. Negative-pressure containment where the brief calls for it. Cleaning regimes that hand the room back ready for use.
Health-and-safety documentation.
Site Safe equivalent inductions, signed-off MSDS for every product on site, daily site reports, and incident reporting consistent with public-sector procurement expectations. The documentation matches the standard a head contractor or an institutional facilities manager expects to see at audit.
Trade record.
Each heritage project leaves a written record of materials, colours, dates, and conditions. The next painter in twenty years should be able to open the file and see what we used and why.
Phased handover.
New-build education projects often hand over in stages so the institution can begin commissioning. We programme our work to release each stage on its agreed date, with QA photography and DFT records for the substrates that require them.
Restraint.
We do not over-restore. A heritage building is allowed to look like a heritage building. The job is to keep it standing and looking right, not to make it look new.
Selected work
Featured projects
New-build institutional work delivered to the architect's specification, coordinated with the head contractor, and completed in time for the academic year.
A full interior fit-out: over 1,170 square metres of new gib stopping to Level 4, painting to more than 1,175 square metres of walls, 288 square metres of ceilings, 11 internal doors, and specialist wet area finishes throughout.
Line marking to the interior sprint track, close to 400 linear metres with a primer coat and two top coats of Mondo H21B elastomeric paint on Sportflex athletic track flooring. An application that sits well outside standard painting work.
A refurbishment across interior and exterior. Level 4 stopping and painting to new gib, and an exterior programme across Linea weatherboard, three-colour Stria feature boards, glulam columns and beams in Resene Natural Wood Oil, fascia, soffits, and veranda posts.
Interior painting of the Otakaro lecture theatres at the Dovedale Campus. Ceilings and walls in Resene 1/8 Black White, Resene Blackjack on the darker architectural elements, and colour introduced through deliberate blocking to dado and skirting areas only.
Coverage
Nationwide, travelling from seven bases.
Regional BaseWe Work Here Too
Tell us about the project, the academic calendar or the consent status, and the procurement route. We will arrange a site walk and send a written quote with the proposed system and programme.