Prepare Your Garden Building For Summer

As Summer rapidly approaches, the spotlight shines onto the garden. We start to develop an enthusiasm for getting outside, getting the garden organised, tidied and spruced up for the Summer so that we can spend more time outside.

Checking Your Building

Want to give your building the once over for the summer? Just give it a wash down with a very mild solution to get rid of the surface dirt and hopefully your building will look as good as new. If you have our Exterior Paint System on your Garden Building, it will offer a long re-decoration cycle. However, a lot of the mass market paints will need repainting perhaps as much as annually. For these paints you may have to take the paint back to the bare wood (by sandpapering or wire-wooling it off), prime it, and then paint on a couple of coats of your chosen colour. If you don't take it back to the bare wood, the paintwork can often just flake or fall off. Sometimes you can clean the paintwork and go over it with sandpaper or wire wool vigorously so that the paint can adhere to the building.

If you have one of our buildings, painted in our exterior paint system, however, it is a much simpler process; you should wash the building down with something like a mild sugar soap solution, de-nib the surface wherever necessary and then repaint with your paint colour. Our exterior paint system does not flake or fall off when re-coating, it can just be reapplied following that simple step.

Points to note:

• Make sure you do any repainting on a fine day but not too hot as you want the paint to dry effectively without any moisture being added.
• Protect your windows with newspaper and masking tape.
• If you have a large building it is possible to rent a sprayer from a tool hire shop (try www.jewson.co.uk) or you can paint with a brush of course. Either way make sure you have smaller brushes for tight spots.
• If you do not have our exterior paint system and you are repainting your building, try Brewers paint merchants, www.brewers.co.uk.
• We can supply all our paints that we use on our buildings direct to our customers.

If you have Cedar Shingles on your roof, these are expected to last 25-30 years. If you have our slate tiles, these could last as long as 50 years. For our heavy-duty felt which we torch on, this could last for 8-15 years depending on exposure. For most other Garden Sheds their felt may need replacing much more regularly, you can buy similar felt from branches of Travis Perkins (www.travisperkins.co.uk) and these are normally tacked on.

If you require any assistance with materials for re-decoration or have any queries regarding garden buildings in general, please do not hesitate to contact us.