Painting Wizards paints houses, roofs, complexes and commercial property in Clifton and across the Atlantic Seaboard. Send the form on this page with what needs doing and we will come out, measure it and put a written price in front of you — itemised, so the preparation and the paint system are separate lines rather than one number.
What we find on Clifton walls
Clifton is built into the slope above the bungalows – modern homes and apartments on very steep, very exposed sites. The property mix is high-value freestanding homes and apartments, almost all on steep access.
A mid-range exterior system will not last here. Coatings that give eight years inland can fail in three on a Clifton sea elevation, so the specification matters more than the price per square metre.
The conditions a coating faces in Clifton
Clifton sits in the Atlantic Seaboard, which gets around 550 mm a year and a hard summer south-easter carrying salt off the water. The result is the harshest salt exposure in Cape Town, straight off the water with no shelter at all.
Across Atlantic Seaboard the practical consequence is salt attack and wind abrasion on west- and south-facing walls, and a repaint interval of three to five years on an exposed sea-facing elevation. A coating put on over a failing one fails at the rate of the layer underneath it, not at its own — which is why the preparation, not the paint, usually decides how long the job lasts.
What we do on site
- Washing down and salt removal — salt left on a wall goes straight under the new coating and lifts it, so a fresh-water wash comes before anything else.
- Exterior walls — sea-facing elevations specified in a coastal-grade system, sheltered elevations often in a standard one. Pricing both the same is how a quote ends up wrong.
- Timber and metal — window frames, balustrades, barge boards and railings, which corrode and rot near the water years before the walls need attention.
- Roof — cleaned, treated for lichen, and rust-treated on metal before coating.
- Interior — walls, ceilings, skirtings and joinery, staged room by room.
- Body corporate — phased per block and quoted per element for trustees.
Two coats over a properly prepared surface is standard, and near the water the preparation is most of the job. As a working figure, a litre of exterior acrylic covers roughly 6 to 8 square metres per coat on smooth plaster and 4 to 5 on rough or porous work. Salt-exposed walls usually take a third coat on the seaward side, and a cheaper system here is a false economy that shows within two summers. Between coats we allow 4 to 6 hours in summer, and a full cure takes about 7 days.
What a quote covers
Painting is priced on area, surface condition and the number of coats, so nobody can give you an honest Clifton figure over the phone without seeing the surfaces.
Exposure changes the price here, so a coastal quote is measured elevation by elevation rather than as one figure for the building. It states the square metres measured, which walls are specified in a coastal system and which are not, the preparation included and the number of coats.
To start, we need the suburb, whether the work is inside, outside, the roof or a combination, roughly how big the property is, and what condition the surfaces are in — sound paint, flaking, damp, or bare plaster.
Close to Clifton
Painters Camps Bay · Painters Green Point · Painters Hout Bay · Painters Llandudno
See painters in Atlantic Seaboard for every area we cover in this part of the Western Cape.