House painting in Birkenhead

Villas and bungalows on Birkenhead Point

Birkenhead Point, covering Hinemoa Street and parts of Rawene and Huka Roads, is a special character area in the Auckland Unitary Plan. Council’s character statement says its houses show building methods from the 1890s to the 1940s: villas, transitional villas, bungalows and state houses, typically timber-framed and weatherboard clad, with timber detailing.

Roofs are mostly corrugated iron, with some clay or concrete tiles, and a few houses are rendered brick. The statement links the area’s growth to the Chelsea Sugar Refinery, which opened in the early 1880s, and to the workers’ houses built for its staff.

• Older weatherboard houses: wet scraping and lead-safe clean-up, careful work around detail.
• Rendered brick houses: crack repair and a masonry paint system.
• Bungalows: wide eaves and bay windows, simpler than villas but with plenty of trim.

Newer two-storey homes on the coastal edge

The North Shore Heritage review notes that most sites around Birkenhead’s coastal edge were developed more recently, and that post-1970 houses there tend to be larger and two-storeyed. A two-storey repaint may need scaffolding, which is planned into the quote.

Birkenhead’s waterfront streets and its inland ridge streets are not equal when it comes to salt, and the building standard treats exposure site by site rather than by suburb. The detail is in how exterior paint ages. The character statement also describes native bush and trees around the coastal margin, which can keep some walls shaded and slow to dry, so mould treatment and drying time come into the plan. Exterior house painting explains the process.