Paint Stripping in Sidmouth

The Moore & Franks approach in Sidmouth

Sidmouth's painted frontages are the town's shop window — the Regency esplanade villas and the seafront terraces along Fore Street carry paint on soft lime render, and when Lyme Bay salt gets into it the coating blisters and flakes fast. Up the Sid valley the 1930s semis at Woolbrook and Sidford stay shaded and damp, and paint peels there too. Stripping failed paint off a soft painted frontage is delicate — a pressure lance would take the render with it. Moore & Franks use DOFF superheated steam to lift old coatings gently, back to a sound surface ready to repaint. Family-run, twenty-five years, £5m insured, 25 minutes from Topsham.

Sidmouth's Esplanade and Fore Street frontages are the town's shop window, and most are painted lime render — soft, historic and unforgiving of rough treatment. Salt off Lyme Bay works into the paint and lifts it in blisters, and by the time a frontage looks tired the coating is often chalking away. Stripping failed paint off render this soft is a job for steam, not a lance: DOFF superheated steam softens and lifts the old coating at low pressure and leaves the lime surface sound, ready to repaint in a breathable finish that suits the building rather than one that will trap moisture and blister again.

Up the Sid valley the 1930s semis at Woolbrook and Sidford sit shaded and slow to dry under Peak Hill, and paint peels there for damp reasons rather than salt ones — masonry paint blistering on the north walls, gloss flaking off window joinery. Out toward the Bowd and Sidbury the render is modern silicone and K-Rend, and where those have been over-painted the newer films sometimes need a poultice or chemical stripper to soften before the steam will take them cleanly. We look at what is on the wall before we decide how to lift it, because the coating decides the method.

On the seafront especially we will talk you out of doing too much. If the paint on a frontage is broadly sound and only failing along a run or two, taking the whole elevation back is overkill and a waste — we will point you at the patch repair instead and say so plainly. Where a painted frontage actually has blown, stripping it back to sound first is the only way a new coat holds on a salt-exposed wall. The free site visit is where we work out which of the two the building needs.

Our Sidmouth customers are typically within 25 minutes of our Exeter base. We cover the wider EX10 postcode area and the surrounding villages (The Esplanade, Sidford, Sidbury, Woolbrook, Peak Hill, Salcombe Hill, Connaught Gardens).