Painting & Decorating in Wembley

Painting & Decorating in Wembley: what is different here

Voids in the Wembley Park towers

With 61.9% of Wembley Park ward's households renting privately in 2021, many flats here change hands every year or two, and each change brings the same list: scuffed hallways, marks where furniture stood, filled screw holes and a kitchen wall stained around the hob. Most of these flats were finished in a single white or off-white emulsion, which makes touching up look patchy, so we usually repaint whole walls corner to corner.

Paint smells linger in sealed modern flats, so we use low-odour water-based paints and run the extract fans while we work. Dust sheets go down in the corridor as well as the flat, because the building's concierge will check.

Fire doors: what must not be painted over

In a block over 11 metres, the flat's front door is a fire door, and the building must check it every year; communal fire doors are checked every quarter. In a licensed Wembley HMO, Brent's condition 22 also requires fire doors to be kept in full working order. Paint is a common reason a door fails.

We keep paint off intumescent strips and smoke seals, hinges and the self-closer, and do not build up layers that stop the door closing fully into its frame. If a seal has already been painted, we tell you, because it may need replacing rather than covering.

Barn Hill frontages: brick, roughcast and half-timbering

Brent's appraisal of the Barn Hill estate describes red brick in relief and diaper patterns, plain clay roof tiles, half-timbering infilled with white roughcast and leaded casement windows. It also criticises houses whose front elevations have been painted red or brick red. Like-for-like repainting of existing timber, roughcast and window frames is routine maintenance.

Painting bare brick for the first time, or changing the colour scheme of a frontage, is the kind of change to discuss with Brent's conservation team first, particularly on the houses covered by the 1995 Article 4 direction.

Interwar interiors in Tokyngton and Preston Road

Semis from the 1920s and 1930s often keep their picture rails, coving and panelled doors under decades of paint. Old plaster cracks along the joints and around the ceiling rose, and lining paper hides a lot of it well. Paint on original joinery in houses of this age can contain lead, so we do not dry sand it; we test where it is doubtful, and use wet abrasion or chemical stripping when old layers need to come off.

That takes longer than a modern flat, and we say so in the quote.

Exterior decoration that Brent's licences expect

Brent's HMO conditions require the outside of the property, including walls, windows and door elements, to be kept in a reasonable decorative order and state of repair. The selective conditions ask licence holders to inspect the exterior at least every six months. Flaking window frames and a peeling front door are therefore not only cosmetic in a licensed let in Wembley Central, Wembley Hill or North Wembley.

We can repaint sills, frames and front doors, and put the photos and dates in the licence file. Work at height that needs scaffolding or roof access is outside what we do.

Official sources

• Private renting in Wembley Park ward, Census 2021
• Annual and quarterly fire door checks in blocks over 11 metres
• Brent HMO conditions 16 and 22 on exterior decoration and fire doors
• Brent selective condition on six-monthly exterior inspections
• Barn Hill materials and painted frontages, Brent appraisal

Last reviewed October 2026 by EliteShires Property Services.