Cladding spraying in Lichfield
Lichfield is a small city on a hard-working stretch of the Midlands. Cladding spraying in Lichfield mostly serves the commercial buildings strung along the A38 and A5 corridors and the business parks around the city: units whose profiled steel or composite facades have faded, chalked or started rusting at the edges while remaining structurally sound. Respraying on site renews the finish without the expense and disruption of recladding.
Our method is survey-led throughout. The building is inspected before it is priced, and the specification is written from what the inspection finds rather than from a standard template. Walls and roof sheets can be covered by the same survey where both need attention.
A small city on a busy corridor
Staffordshire’s southern edge carries a dense mix of distribution units, trade parks, manufacturing buildings and depots, much of it built from the 1980s onwards in coated steel. With the Birmingham conurbation immediately to the south, the area also holds plenty of older clad stock on long-established estates, now well past the life of its original finish.
The symptoms are consistent: colour that has dulled unevenly, a chalky film that transfers to your hand, and rust tracing along the sheet ends where the factory coating never fully protected the cut steel. None of these mean the cladding has failed. They mean its coating has.
For businesses on these corridors the facade works as advertising whether anyone intends it to or not. Thousands of vehicles pass a unit on the A38 every day, and a faded, rust-streaked elevation says something to every one of them. A recoat in a sharp, current colour scheme changes that message for a small fraction of what the building itself cost.
How the survey shapes the job
A survey settles what the building actually needs:
- The substrate, and how firmly the existing coating still holds to it
- Corrosion mapped edge by edge, not estimated from the ground
- Repairs to sheets, flashings, sealants and fixings before recoating
- Access, masking and programme constraints around a working site
- The preparation and coating system the conditions call for
The work then follows that written specification in order, finishing with an elevation-by-elevation check before handover. Tamworth, Cannock and Burton upon Trent are covered by the same approach, and so is Birmingham itself. Where a site stays operational during the work, the programme is sequenced around deliveries, parking and opening hours, all of which the survey records in advance.
A straight answer on what spraying cannot fix
We are equally clear about the limits. Spraying cannot restore steel that corrosion has gone through, hold together composite panels that are delaminating, or compensate for fixings that have failed. Where the survey finds those conditions, the report recommends repair or replacement first, and the coating proposal waits or is withdrawn. The distinction we draw is between cosmetic failure, which spraying addresses well, and structural failure, which it must never be used to hide.
That honesty occasionally costs us a job. It also means that when we do recommend spraying, the recommendation is worth something.
Why we put the survey before the quote
The quiet advantage of a survey-led contractor is that surprises get found early, while they are still information rather than invoices. Condition, preparation and scope are established before anyone commits, and the finished work is checked against the same written specification it was agreed on. You also keep a record of the building’s condition that is useful well beyond the coating decision, for maintenance planning and for any future sale or letting.
If a clad commercial building in or around Lichfield is starting to look tired, an inspection will tell you whether spraying is the right answer, and exactly what the job involves if it is.
