A Pine Monks Bench, Repainted for a Camberley Hallway

You know the piece even if you've never called it by name: a monks bench, high-backed, with a lift-up seat for shoes, wellies or whatever else a hallway needs to swallow. This one had just been through a full house redecoration, and it hadn't survived the changeover well. The pale pine that once looked warm and rustic now looked exactly like what it was — the one thing in the room nobody had got round to updating.

Our customer in Camberley wasn't ready to let it go, though. She knew how useful it was — a proper piece of storage furniture doing a job that's hard to replace — she just needed it in a colour that matched the rest of the house. She chose Dulux Timeless in an eggshell finish, a soft, warm off-white that was never going to fight with a freshly decorated hallway. The target? A white-painted monks bench.

We followed our usual process. A thorough sand came first, keying the surface across the flat panelled front and back, then working into the scalloped top edge and the turned detailing with finer paper. Pine is riddled with knots, and knots are notorious for bleeding resin through a light-coloured topcoat, so once the bench was de-dusted and taped up to protect the hinges and hardware, we sealed the whole piece with Zinsser BIN. It's a specialist stain-blocking primer, and on a piece this knotty it earns its keep — it masks the knots completely and gives the paint nothing to argue with. We followed that with a Zinsser undercoat, which builds body and evens out the surface before any colour goes anywhere near it.

With the preparation done, we applied the Dulux Timeless eggshell. It's a finish that suits a hallway bench particularly well — hard-wearing enough for a spot that gets sat on, kicked, and used as a dumping ground for school bags every day, without ever looking hard or plasticky. To finish, we tidied up a couple of small glitches, removed the masking tape, and booked the hinges back onto the seat lid so it opens and closes exactly as it should.

Back in its hallway, against the black and white check floor and a freshly painted panelled door, the white-painted monks bench finally looks like it belongs to the same house as everything around it — rather than a leftover from before the redecoration started.

A solid, satisfying Camberley job. If you've got a bench, settle or storage piece that's fallen behind the rest of the room, please get in touch. Because we can paint your furniture.