Weatherboard House Painting Melbourne

A full weatherboard repaint on a standard single storey Melbourne home costs $12,000 to $16,000, in line with our Melbourne house painting cost guide. Two storey homes run $16,000 to $22,000 because of scaffolding and the extra surface area, and heritage weatherboards with ornate detail, multiple colours or lead paint can reach $20,000 to $35,000. Most of that money is not paint, it is labour on preparation. On a typical job the washing, scraping, sanding, repairs and priming take two to three days before the first topcoat goes on, and that preparation is what decides whether the finish lasts five years or fifteen.

The process is the same on every job. We high-pressure wash the whole exterior to strip dirt, mould and chalky residue, scrape and sand all loose paint back to a sound edge, cut out and replace any rotten or split boards, spot-prime every patch of bare timber, caulk the gaps, then apply two full topcoats of Dulux Weathershield Low Sheen. Timber is a living material that expands and contracts with moisture and temperature, so the coating has to be flexible enough to move with it. That is why we do not put budget paint on weatherboards, a rigid film cracks at every board overlap within a couple of summers.

Melbourne's west is particularly hard on weatherboards. Afternoon sun bakes west-facing walls through summer, the flat, open streets of Footscray, Sunshine and Werribee offer little shade, and bayside homes in Williamstown and Altona add salt spray to the mix. From the Victorian cottages of Yarraville and Seddon to the Californian bungalows of Essendon, we have been repainting Melbourne weatherboard homes since 1987. We can colour-match period schemes from the Dulux Heritage range or from existing paint chips, so the home keeps its character while getting the protection it needs.