About
One person quotes it, and the same person paints it.
McGreal & Co. is a painting and decorating business working in Letterkenny and the surrounding area — interior decoration, exterior painting, and finishing to doors and joinery. A limited number of private homes are taken on at a time, and every job quoted is carried out by the same hands that quoted it.
The name
McGreal was my grandmother’s maiden name. She was from Mayo; my grandfather was from Monaghan. They married and moved to Canada shortly afterwards, where he worked as a carpenter and taught deaf children, and she raised seven.
She lived to a hundred and two. For most of that time she was the centre of the family — the person everything else organised itself around. My grandfather died before I was born, so I knew him only through her stories and through the woodwork he left behind, which was still in the family houses I grew up in.
The name over the door is hers. It seemed the right one to use.
A family of trades
What my grandfather had went down the line. Of his seven children, one became a luthier building guitars, another built a cabinetry business. It carried on into the grandchildren.
My own father came from Dutch stock and ran a painting and property maintenance company in Canada. I worked with him through my youth, and most of what he taught me had nothing to do with brushes.
He was insistent about light. A wall that looks finished under a ceiling bulb will show every flaw the first bright morning after you’ve been paid, so you work under proper lighting and you look at the surface from an angle, not straight on. He was the same about sanding equipment and about washing walls down before anything went near them — a surface that hasn’t been cleaned and prepared will fail no matter what goes on top of it, and no quality of finish coat will save it.
The tools that make the difference on a job are mostly not the ones people picture. That is still how the work is done here, and it is set out in detail on Our Standard.
David Zylstra
About the owner
I’m David. I’m a second-generation Canadian, grew up proud of the Irish side of it, and moved to Donegal after lockdown — to the island I grew up hearing about.
I studied business administration and management at university, and spent several years in business before coming back to the trade. That side of it shows up in how a job is run rather than how it’s painted: proper written quotations, dates that are kept, and a clear specification you can hold me to.
The painting itself I learned from my father, and I still do it the way he did.
David Zylstra, McGreal & Co.
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No charge for the visit or the quote. Site visits arranged around you, evenings included.