Service area
House Painters in Centretown
Victorian brick rowhouses, apartments and condo towers, where building rules shape every schedule as much as the surfaces do.
Centretown is the densest mix of housing in the city. Nineteen and early twentieth century brick rowhouses still line the side streets, many with wooden porches, cornices and window surrounds that were built with far more detail than anything constructed since. Between and behind them are low rise apartment buildings, converted houses split into units, and towers that replaced the older stock through the 1970s and after.
The work here is unusually varied. One project is a brick facade with original trim that needs careful repair. The next is a rental apartment that needs an even, washable finish between tenants. The next is a condo unit where the building's rules govern the hours, the elevator and the protection of the corridor.
Also serving
The Glebe, Vanier and Westboro are the neighbouring areas we cover.
02 / Surfaces
Original brick, wood detail and plaster inside.
The exterior of a Centretown rowhouse is usually brick with painted wood or metal detail: the cornice, the window heads and sills, the porch posts and the railing. That woodwork is the part that fails first and the part that carries the character of the building. It needs scraping, filling and priming rather than a quick coat, and where the profile has been softened by decades of paint it may need repair.
Interiors in these houses often have plaster walls with deep baseboards, picture rails and doors with original hardware. Plaster cracks in the same places every winter, and the repairs need a wider feather than drywall to disappear under raking light from tall windows. In converted apartments, the layout adds small rooms and narrow passages, which makes the work slower per square metre.
Towers are different again: drywall, tight tolerances, and surfaces that are usually in reasonable condition but finished in flat paint that shows every mark from furniture and luggage.
03 / Access
Street parking, shared corridors and service elevators.
Access is the first practical question in Centretown. Most streets have permit parking and no lane, so materials are carried in and staged inside. Rowhouse porches are reached from the sidewalk, which means the work needs to stay clear of pedestrians and be tidied at the end of each day.
In apartment buildings and towers, the service elevator is the bottleneck. Corridors, thresholds and the elevator car are protected along the route, and the work is planned around the booking the building gives you. Where a building manager wants the scope in advance, we provide it.
04 / The season
Street trees, exhaust and a compressed exterior window.
Exterior work on a downtown street has conditions you do not find in a suburb. Street trees shade the facade for part of the day. Traffic and building exhaust leave a film on lower surfaces that has to be washed before anything is painted. Ladders are set on sidewalks rather than lawns.
The season is the same as elsewhere in Ottawa, from late spring into early autumn within the product's limits, but the working day is shorter because the street is busier and because shaded elevations dry more slowly. Interior work runs all year and is often the easier project to schedule in a building where exterior access is complicated.
Painting questions in Centretown.
Services in Centretown
Services
Request a consultation.
Tell us whether it is a house, an apartment or a condo unit, and what the building requires from a contractor.
Request a consultation
Tell us a little about the space and the work. We reply by email with next steps and a time to walk through the project.