Exterior Wall Coating on a Supermarket near Derby, Derbyshire

What our survey found

Every job we take on in Derbyshire starts with a survey, and this one was no different. We walked all four elevations with the managing agent, checked the condition of the cladding sheet by sheet, and set out what the coating system would need to last. The reading confirmed what the eye had already suggested. Sound sheets, a tired factory finish, and a handful of areas that wanted attention before any paint went on.

The main finding was widespread chalking across the plastisol, heaviest on the south and west elevations where the sun sits longest. Along the sheet laps and at the cut edges we found early cut edge corrosion, the fine rust that creeps in once the factory coating breaks down. A number of fixings had weathered and needed spot priming, and the gutters and downpipes were checked so that nothing we did would trap water against the cladding. All of it was noted and built into the scheme rather than discovered halfway through the work.

Access was the other half of the survey. The elevations are tall and the car park stays busy through trading hours, so we planned the work around a mobile elevating work platform that could reach the full height of the cladding while keeping our spray teams safely off ladders. We mapped out where the platform would stand on each elevation and how it would move as the store filled and emptied through the day, so that our presence never got in the way of a delivery or a customer.

Keeping the supermarket operational mattered most of all. We phased the work elevation by elevation, cordoned off small working zones with banksmen where the platform crossed pedestrian routes, and timed the noisier pressure washing for quieter periods. Customers kept shopping, deliveries kept arriving, and the Derby store never lost a trading hour to the coating works.

The finished supermarket

The change is hard to overstate. Where the supermarket had presented a chalky, streaked grey that read as neglected, it now carries a deep, even Burgundy that pulls the whole frontage together. The colour sits flat and consistent across every sheet, with the profiles picked out cleanly and the laps and cut edges sealed against the weather.

For the client, the return is a store that looks properly looked-after and a cladding system given fresh, long-term protection without the cost and disruption of replacement. The spray-applied satin finish is tough, easy to keep clean and far more resistant to the chalking that had aged the original. It is the kind of repaint that changes how a building is read from the road, and it does so in a single, well-managed programme rather than a drawn-out rebuild.

The managing agent now has a supermarket that presents well to shoppers and protects the landlord's asset over the long term. We handed back a clean, tidy site with all masking removed, the car park swept and the elevations photographed for the record. This sits alongside another recent project where we brought a tired commercial building back to life with the same survey-led approach.

It is a good example of what spray painting cladding can achieve on a working retail site in Derbyshire. A genuine transformation, delivered around the trading day, with a finish built to hold its colour and shrug off the weather for a long time to come.

Standards behind our exterior wall coating work

A trading supermarket means the public are feet away from the work, so access and containment are planned before anyone lifts a gun. Our teams plan every job around the HSE's work at height rules, and we hold CHAS accreditation so the health and safety paperwork a managing agent or retail landlord asks for is ready before the first van arrives.