Maintaining your home’s exterior

We’ll prepare areas for painting by carrying out external repairs and rendering to any joinery in need of work.

Then, we’ll start painting and decorating the external surfaces of your home. If needed, we’ll also decorate inside communal areas and communal rooms in independent living schemes.

We’ll contact you to let you know about our plans to update your external decoration and which contractor will be carrying out the work.

The contractor will get in touch to introduce themselves and explain what sort of work they’ll be doing. They’ll let you know if you can choose any of the colours and clarify how long they expect the work to take. They’ll also put you in touch with a liaison officer who will chat to you about access arrangements and be in touch with you before the work starts.

From time to time there might be unexpected changes to the schedule. We’ll keep you posted if this happens.

Asbestos surveys

Before the work starts, we might also want to carry out an asbestos survey in your home. This is a routine safety check, and nothing to worry about.

We need to check there’s no hidden asbestos which could be disturbed when work is being carried out. If we do need to do a survey, our specialist contractor Environtec will contact you directly.

Not every home needs an asbestos survey.

The contractor will try to complete external work when the weather conditions are good, usually in the spring, summer or autumn. Internal work can be carried out through all seasons.

If your external door is painted, you’ll be given a choice of colours to pick from by your liaison officer. If you have stained wooden doors, we’ll restore them to their original condition.

First, make sure the contractor can get to the area they want to work on by removing anything blocking it, like a car in your driveway.

While the work is happening, you’ll need to keep your children away from the area and keep your pets inside.

Your contractor will let you know how long they think it will take to dry – you might be asked to keep doors or windows open.

If the contractor has needed to build scaffolding, please leave it alone, and if you see anyone on it who’s not part of their team let us know right away by calling 0345 678 0555.

External decoration work generally happens Monday to Friday between 8am and 6pm. In some cases, your contractor might need to put up scaffolding. If they do, they’ll make sure it’s safe, presents no obstructions or risks, and remains up for as little time as possible.

The safety of you and your family, and our contractors, is our top priority. Your external decoration will be fully supervised by a site manager through to completion.

Our contractors should always wear the correct PPE (personal protective equipment) but if you’ve got any concerns this isn’t happening, let us know – we’ll never risk your safety, and neither should our contractors.

If you have any questions or would like more information on our arrangements for external painting, just drop us a line via our Contact us page.

The information on this page mainly applies to our renting customers. If you’re a homeowner, we might carry out external decorations, but only if your agreement with Accent confirms that we’re responsible for maintaining the external areas. You can usually find your lease agreement in MyAccount.

If you are unsure about what your agreement says, please contact us and a member of the leasehold and homeownership team will get back to you.