Strip the wallpaper off a hallway in one of the tall Victorian terraces around Barnes or East Sheen and you’ll usually find three or four decades of other people’s decisions underneath — lining paper over lining paper, a mist coat that was never really a mist coat. It’s the sort of job that separates someone who can hold a brush from someone who was actually taught the trade, and back in June ninety-two apprentices from across the UK proved that teaching still matters. The Painting and Decorating Association’s Apprentice of the Year grand final, held in Doncaster, had finalists from as far as Belfast and Plymouth going head to head on a six-hour set piece: freehand cutting in of curves and straight lines, stencil work, and broken colour effects like rag-rolling and sponging.
That last part is worth dwelling on, because broken colour and specialist finishes are exactly where a lot of decorators cut corners now everyone’s in a rush for a flat trade emulsion and out the door by lunchtime. Done properly, rag-rolling needs a scumble glaze over a dry base coat and a steady hand working in sections before it skins over — rush it and you get streaking that shows up the moment the sun comes round in the afternoon.
We’ve been working on houses across Fulham, Putney and Chiswick since 1986, long enough to remember when every apprentice came up doing exactly these set pieces on a Wednesday afternoon at college. It’s why prep still gets more of our time than the paint does — sugar soap down, filler in, sanded back properly, and only then a mist coat if it’s bare plaster. Skip that and no amount of Farrow & Ball on top will stop it flashing under the wall lights six months later.
The PDA’s Neil Ogilvie said the calibre of work this year was outstanding, and having judged plenty of jobs ourselves over the years, that tracks — the standard apprentices are being held to now is higher than it was, not lower, whatever people assume about trades struggling for good staff. And competitions like this are as much about the customer as the apprentice: a reminder of what “decorated properly” is actually supposed to look like.
If your hallway, or your whole house, needs someone who still does it the long way round, Rennie Decorating Services covers West London from Fulham to Richmond. Have a look at our recent work at renniedecoratingservices.co.uk or give us a call for a free quote.