How to Prepare Your Home Before the Decorator Arrives

You don't need to do anything before a decorator arrives — a good one will protect and prepare everything themselves. But a bit of preparation the night before means more of the time you're paying for goes into actual decorating, and it means your belongings are handled by you rather than by someone else.

Here's a sensible checklist.

The evening before

Move what you can

Small furniture, lamps, side tables, plants, rugs and anything free-standing is worth taking out of the room entirely. Larger items can usually stay — they get moved to the middle and covered — but the emptier the room, the faster and better the job.

Clear the surfaces

Mantelpieces, shelves, windowsills, alcoves. Anything that would need picking up and putting down again is time on the clock.

Take down pictures and mirrors

Leave the hooks and fixings in place unless you want them gone — and say so if you'd like the holes filled, because that changes the prep. If you're planning to hang things back in exactly the same spots, take a quick photo of the wall first.

Take down curtains and blinds

Especially if the window frames, sills or the wall around them are being painted. Poles and tracks can normally stay unless the wall behind needs work.

Deal with anything fragile or precious

Move it to another room. Decorators are careful, but the safest place for something irreplaceable is nowhere near a ladder.

On the day

Parking

If parking near your house is difficult — and on plenty of terraced streets around Preston and Chorley it is — mention it in advance. Tools and dust sheets get carried in, and paint gets carried in and out repeatedly.

Access and keys

Sort out beforehand whether you're in, out, or leaving a key. If you're going to be at work all day, agree it in advance rather than on the morning.

Pets

Cats and wet paint are a genuinely bad combination, and dogs and open front doors are worse. Plan to keep them somewhere else in the house, and say if you'd like doors kept shut.

Heating and ventilation

Paint dries best in a warm, ventilated room. In winter, having the heating on low genuinely helps. Windows will be opened during the day.

Things worth mentioning up front

• Anything you already know about the walls — a patch of damp, a crack that keeps coming back, a wall that was replastered.
• What's behind the wallpaper, if you know and it's being stripped.
• Any deadline you're working to — a new sofa arriving, family visiting, a room needed back for a specific day.
• Colours you've already bought — including any leftover tins, in case there's enough for touch-ups later.

What not to bother with

Don't wash the walls, don't fill holes, and don't try to sand anything. Prep is part of the job and doing it yourself the night before usually creates more work rather than less — half-filled holes have to be raked out and done properly anyway.

Della covers Preston, Leyland, Chorley and South Ribble, brings her own dust sheets and protection, and leaves rooms cleaner than she found them. If you'd like a free, no-obligation quote, just ask.