Painters in Adelaide's Southern Suburbs

Local painting considerations

• Salt spray along the gulf coast

  From Hallett Cove down to Sellicks Beach, exteriors take salt spray and wind-blown sand off Gulf St Vincent. Salt sits on the paint film and eats bare steel, so gutters, balustrades, screen doors and steel posts at Moana, Port Noarlunga and O'Sullivan Beach are usually the first things to fail. We wash the salt off with fresh water before sanding, treat rust and prime with a corrosion-inhibiting primer, use marine-grade systems on exposed metal, and finish with UV-resistant 100% acrylic topcoats. The seaward wall always weathers first.

• Cracked render on reactive clay

  Like much of the Adelaide plains, the flatter ground around Morphett Vale, Reynella, Hackham and Christie Downs has reactive clay that swells after winter rain and shrinks through summer. Rendered walls and masonry crack at the corners of openings and along control joints. We rake out and fill those cracks with a flexible filler, then finish with an elastomeric membrane coating that bridges hairline movement instead of a rigid paint that splits again the next season. Wide or stepped cracks get referred to a builder before we paint.

• Heat, UV and dark colours

  The south gets hot, dry summers, and the newer estates at Seaford Heights, Seaford Rise and Aldinga Beach have little tree cover, so north and west facing walls cop full UV. Heat and UV break down binders and pigments, so every exterior system we use is a UV-resistant 100% acrylic. Dark colours on Colorbond, weatherboard and roofs run much hotter than light ones and fade sooner; we say so before a colour is locked in. Heat-reflective roof coatings suit the 1980s cement roofs in Woodcroft and Happy Valley.

• Stone cottages and lead paint

  Willunga, Old Noarlunga, Old Reynella and McLaren Vale keep 1850s to 1900s stone cottages and shopfronts built with soft local stone and lime mortar that must breathe. We never paint bare stone, and stone rendered or painted long ago gets a breathable coating rather than a sealed acrylic that traps damp. Any home built before 1970, including the older streets of Christies Beach and Hackham, is assumed to have lead paint under later coats and is prepared under AS/NZS 4361.2:2017: wet sanding, containment, no dry sanding or burning off.