Paint Stripping in Topsham

The Moore & Franks approach in Topsham

Topsham is home ground — our yard is on Ferryman Way — and the town's painted surfaces are mostly old and mostly precious. The Dutch-gabled merchant houses on The Strand, the Georgian and Victorian terraces off Fore Street and the Quay, and the listed cottages in the conservation core all carry paint on lime render and period joinery that has to breathe. When that paint blisters and flakes in the estuary salt and river mist, it needs stripping back gently, not blasting. Moore & Franks use DOFF superheated steam to soften and lift failed coatings without harming soft render or old timber. Family-run, twenty-five years, insured to £5m — properly local.

Central Topsham is largely listed, and that shapes every paint-stripping job here. The Dutch-gabled merchant houses on The Strand and the Georgian terraces off Fore Street carry paint over lime render and old timber that has to stay breathable — seal it or scar it and you cause damp problems worse than the flaking paint you came to fix. When estuary salt and river mist have blistered a limewashed or painted frontage, DOFF superheated steam is the right tool: it softens and lifts the failed coating at low pressure and leaves the historic surface exactly as it should be, ready for a breathable repaint.

A lot of our Topsham work is painted joinery — sash windows, doors and railings on the terraces down toward the Quay where layered gloss has cracked and lifted off the wood. Steam takes that back without the scorch marks a heat gun leaves or the gouges a scraper digs into soft old timber. Access is half the job here too: the lanes off Fore Street are narrow and parking is tight, so we plan each set-up so stripping one frontage doesn't block the road for the neighbours. Being based on Ferryman Way, we know these streets and how to work them.

Out toward Exeter Road the houses are newer and the paint is modern masonry finish, which fails differently — patch-flaking rather than wholesale — and that is where we are most likely to say a full strip isn't worth it. If a coating is broadly sound, we will point you at a repair and repaint rather than take the lot off. Where the paint really has blown, on old fabric or new, we strip it back to sound first so the next coat holds. The free visit is a five-minute drive for us, and it is where we settle which job it actually is.

Our Topsham customers are typically within 10 minutes of our Exeter base. We cover the wider EX3 postcode area and the surrounding villages (The Strand & the Quay, Goat Walk riverside path, Bowling Green Marsh, Fore Street, Darts Farm, Topsham Lock).