Have Brush, Will Travel (Ireland & Beyond)

I paint kitchens anywhere on the island of Ireland (further afield too)

Travel is part of my job. After all, it’s easier for me to go to a kitchen than for a kitchen to come to me. Obviously, if I could paint a kitchen sitting on the sofa at home with the Six Nations on the telly, I would. But that’s never going to happen.

While most of the kitchens I paint are in houses in Munster, I do travel all over Ireland. In fact, I’ll be in Ennis painting a kitchen when this post appears. And I have several Dublin kitchens booked this year already.

I’d travel anywhere in the world to paint a kitchen, provided I could get my paint through customs. By the way, Wales are away to Ireland and England in the Six Nations this year, so if you know anyone in the catering departments at the Aviva or Twickenham, please let them know I’m more than happy to paint the kitchen at the ground. I’ll give you the dates.

When I paint a kitchen here in Cork, I get to go home in the evening. Painting a kitchen away from home is a little different. Even my little ones know it’s a bit special. They think what I do must be terribly important if I have to travel for a few days. I have them almost convinced a kitchen painter is like being a rocket scientist or brain surgeon or Batman. I almost got caught out on that last one when my little boy pointed out white overalls are (in his quite angry opinion) “a stupid superhero costume”. The main issue seemed to be the lack of a cape. I explained my overalls have loads of pockets for cool gadgets, but he wasn’t having any of it.

Painting kitchens throughout Ireland

Back to the travel.

I offer people two options.

First, I can stay overnight in a B&B nearby and paint the kitchen at the house as I usually do—arriving in the morning and leaving in the evening. I stay on location for as long as the job requires.

Or I can take the kitchen cabinet doors away with me and paint them in my workshop in Cloyne, Co. Cork. Many clients are happy for me to do so. The doors have to come off the cabinets anyway to be painted, so the actual painting procedure is exactly the same. It just happens back at the Bat Cave, sorry, workshop.

When I have agreed to take the doors away, I will often stay overnight for one or two nights anyway. The structures around the doors also need painting of course, and I can hardly take those away with me. (See my earlier fantasy of painting kitchens in my own living room with the rugby on.)

The benefit of taking the doors away with me to Cork is cost. Staying overnight is an added expense. Now I don’t insist on the Shelbourne or anything, but B&Bs don’t come free either. That’s a cost I have to pass on. So any nights I don’t have to stay over are a bonus for the client.

It’s also important for me to balance the cost of a B&B with the cost of diesel. Sometimes I’m as well staying over, rather than travelling home and returning with the finished doors. I’ll always run through the choices with a client and we can settle on the most cost efficient one.

One final thing I should mention. I do put the doors back on. I’m not IKEA. Like I mentioned earlier, the doors always have to come off to be painted. Occasionally, the hinges of the doors will be tricky. In those cases, I get in touch with the person who built the kitchen. The problem isn’t so much taking the doors off. It’s getting them back on again properly. There’s no point me creating a perfect finish if the doors aren’t perfectly hung.

Perfectman would be my superhero name. (That sound you can hear is my wife laughing so hard she fell off her chair.)