Painting and Finishing Editing and Proofreading Services

The paint fails in eighteen months and everybody looks at the paint. It is almost never the paint. It is the surface it went onto — damp, dusty, chalky, glossy, or simply not what the specification assumed — and the record of what that surface was like, and what was done to it, is either a page of the specification or a memory nobody shares.

We edit what painting and decorating contractors produce — surface preparation specifications and standards, coating system specifications and their sequences, substrate condition surveys and reports, inspection and hold point documentation, wet film and dry film thickness records, environmental condition records for application, protective coating and steelwork specifications, colour and finish approval documentation, quotations and their exclusions, warranty and maintenance documentation, and defect investigation reports. Our editors work on the preparation nobody sees afterwards.

The surface preparation specification and its inspection points are what determine a coating's life, and their failure is describing an outcome that cannot be checked. "Surfaces to be clean, dry and free from contamination" is agreed by everyone and verified by nobody. We work through these so preparation is specified as a named standard with the method and the resulting condition, since a stated cleanliness grade and surface profile can be compared against a photographic reference on site and "clean" cannot; so a hold point is placed after preparation and before the first coat, with who inspects, what they check and what happens if they do not attend within a stated time, because preparation that has been closed over is preparation that was never inspected; so the environmental limits are given as numbers — the substrate temperature relative to dew point, the maximum relative humidity, the minimum air temperature, and the overcoating window — as these are the conditions painters work outside every winter; so any existing coating is identified with what it is and whether the new system is compatible, given that the commonest catastrophic failure is a new system lifting an old one; so the wet film thickness required to achieve the specified dry film is stated, because that is the number a painter can actually measure while working; and so what happens to the warranty if a hold point is skipped is stated. Specifications written this way produce coatings that reach their design life.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including specifications, records and project information. We are editors rather than coatings specialists or inspectors, and we offer no view on systems, preparation standards or compatibility. What we can do is make the preparation checkable while it can still be checked.