About Us
What we do
Hammers & Brushes offers painting, plastering, carpentry and other repair services to the residential sector, collaborating with you to beautify your space, and ultimately, bring your vision to life.
Where we do it
Hammers & Brushes primarily focusses on the Brisbane, Ipswich and Lockyer regions, but has completed projects from Noosa to Southport, from Redland Bay to Toowoomba and everything in between.
Why we do it
The Hammers & Brushes journey was driven from the very beginning by a simple, twofold idea: to make every project speak for itself, and to beautify Southeast Queensland, one job at a time.
Where we Came From
Leonardo grew up in 1930s Chile on motorbikes and under trucks. Part of a long line of engineers, mechanics and steel workers, he learned all he knew from his father, who had designed, built and sold the first combine harvester in Chile at the tender age of sixteen. Leonardo could find solutions to such challenging repairs that even the local army base approached him with “unsolvables” on the odd occasion. In the early 1970s, he built his own home with the help of his teenage son and unofficial apprentice, Homero. Once finished, fruit trees were planted, business was booming, and life was good – but Pinochet’s dictatorship was destroying the country, and at the close of the decade the family migrated to Australia.
Homero arrived in Sydney in 1980 at the age of twenty-two, with a young family to feed and a suitcase full of dreams. A skilled welder, mechanic and fitter/turner – but lacking the language and how-to of a new country – he found work with a painter, where he infused every task with the ingenuity required of him in his father’s mechanical workshop. For the next decade he hung plenty of wallpaper, repaired plenty of ornamental ceilings and restored plenty of homes across the city. He moved the family to Brisbane in 1990, where he scored in the carpentry and tiling games. Decades of exposure to a vast range of trade secrets made him renowned, like his father, for fixing the unfixable. Eventually, his three sons Diego, Benjamin and Jonatan also grew up to service the community.
In 2002, Diego opened his own painting business – DJ Painting and Maintenance, which later became D & S Coatings –in south-west Brisbane. By the mid-2010s, the D & S Coatings team had ballooned to multiple crews, including Benji and Jono, his two younger brothers. Over its 20-year lifespan, D & S Coatings was responsible for the paintwork on over 3000 homes across Brisbane, focussing on boutique designs for Kalka, Davenport Homes and Castle Glenn Homes before closing in 2023.
By this time Benji had spent twelve months learning the ropes of the carpentry scene, spawning the Hammers & Brushes ethos in the process. In 2023 he was contracted by Array of Colour, First Response Maintenance Solutions, Queensland Interior Linings and BG Global to conduct a variety of jobs including carpentry and plaster repairs, painting and line marking. Jono, on the other hand, had specialised in floor coatings and textures, spending 2020-2022 travelling the Queensland coastline, restoring driveways and garage floors.
In 2024, Diego, Benji and Jono rejoined forces under the Hammers & Brushes flag. From roof restorations to stencilling your driveway and everything in between, you can rest assured that Hammers & Brushes will provide top notch workmanship and beautify your neighbourhood, one job at a time.