A new name. A story that goes back generations.
Painting and decorating has been part of my family for as long as I can remember. My great-grandfather was a decorator, and the trade carried down to my dad, who went on to run his own business. Some of my earliest memories are going out on jobs with him at weekends and through the school holidays, handed a brush and left to get on with it.
When I left school, at sixteen, I started working alongside him properly. To begin with that just meant learning to decorate. But over the years I picked up everything else without really noticing - watching how he dealt with people on site and customers in their homes, how he priced a job and got the invoicing out, how he handled suppliers, and how he adapted when a job threw up something nobody planned for. Looking back, I took in far more than I realised at the time.
Probably the biggest lesson was standards. A high standard of workmanship was never negotiable, but neither was the way you conducted yourself in someone’s home. People remember both. It’s a simple thing, but it has stayed with me ever since.
When I later relocated to Somerset, I took that experience with me and started out on my own, painting and decorating. In that time I built up a good reputation locally and plenty of repeat work, and alongside that I’d take on the odd bit of subcontracting for other companies when the opportunity came up. Wherever I was working, one thing kept coming up. Customers would ask whether I knew anyone who could take care of other work while I was there. It happened again and again, and after a while it was hard to ignore.
Fast forward to today, and that’s exactly what Valen is - a property maintenance company covering the trades a home or building actually needs, all under one roof, with one point of contact from the first conversation to the last.
Painting and decorating will always be an important part of where we came from and what we do. Today, my son has his own business in the trade too, continuing a family connection that now stretches across four generations.
Valen is simply the next chapter in that story.
Whatever the job, it’s treated the same way it always has been. You’ll always know who you’re dealing with, and that’s the bit that hasn’t changed.
