28 April Exterior First, Almost Always
When a whole house needs doing, our usual recommendation is to complete the exterior first and the interior second. It is not a rule, but the reasoning holds up in most cases.
Exterior work is weather-dependent and has a narrow season. Interior work can be done in any month. If you start inside and run over, you can lose the exterior window entirely and wait until the following spring — with a year of further weathering on surfaces that were already due attention.
There is also a practical reason. Exterior work is where problems get found: a failed gutter, a rotten sill, damp tracking through a wall. Those problems show up inside as stained plaster and peeling paint. Decorating the inside before fixing the outside means paying to decorate the same wall twice.
The Sequence We Normally Follow
Within each half of the job, the order matters as much as the exterior-versus-interior question.
- Access and repairs first — scaffold, carpentry, guttering, render repairs
- Exterior preparation, then masonry, then joinery and rainwater goods
- Inside: ceilings, then walls, then woodwork, then floors
- Anything that creates dust before anything that needs to stay clean
When to Do the Interior First Instead
There are cases where reversing it is the right call.
If you are moving in and one or two rooms need to be habitable by a fixed date, do those rooms first — a home you can live in beats a perfect programme. If the interior has damage from a leak that is already repaired, there is nothing to wait for. And if you are selling, the exterior is what buyers see first, but a single tired room that spoils viewings may be the better place to spend a limited budget.
Splitting It Across Two Budgets
Most full redecorations we quote get split across two financial years. That is entirely normal and it does not cost more, as long as you split it along a sensible line: complete elevations, or complete floors, rather than half-finishing everything.
What does cost more is splitting the exterior across two seasons when scaffold is involved, because you pay to put the access up twice.
Get One Quote for the Whole Thing
Even if you intend to phase the work, it is worth getting the whole property quoted at once. It gives you a real total to plan against, it lets us sequence the phases sensibly, and it usually reveals a few jobs that are much cheaper done alongside something else than on their own.