Painters Coogee

Coogee is a salt-air suburb and it shows on the paint. Homes within a few streets of the beach cop constant salt deposits, and it works into every gap — around window frames, under fascias, into any hairline crack in render. On the older brick and rendered homes through the back streets, the first things to go are usually the metal balustrades and the window frames on the seaward elevation — and once rust is under the paint film, coating over the top of it doesn’t stop it.

But Coogee isn’t one exposure — it’s a hill. Properties on the beachfront and the first few streets up are in the full brunt of it. Head back toward Randwick and the salt load drops off noticeably, and the job changes with it. Two houses ten minutes’ walk apart can need genuinely different approaches, which is why we won’t quote a Coogee exterior over the phone.

The mix runs from red-brick interwar apartment blocks to rendered contemporary rebuilds to a solid stock of Californian bungalows. The bungalows have detailed timber — verandah posts, brackets, window joinery — that needs real preparation, not a quick sand. The apartment blocks are usually strata work with rendered common areas and shared balconies. The rebuilds are render and metal, and the metal is what needs watching.

On every Coogee exterior we do, washing the salt off before coating isn’t optional — coating over salt is a well-understood way to shorten the life of a finish.