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Having Your House PaintedWhen you are a new homeowner, you gradually learn about all the upkeep and maintenance required to keep your home in running order. Some tasks come up often - weeding, mowing the lawn, cleaning the bathroom, while some problems and projects come up only every decade or two, like replacing a furnace, painting the house, replacing the roof. When it comes to paint, a good paint job can last you 6-10 years in most environments, sometime less under harsh conditions. Having bought a house 4 years ago and inheriting a 4 or 5 year old paint job, we recently faced the task of having our home painted, both to change colors and to get a jump on peeling paint that was beginning to form on most of the trim and fascia boards (the siding was in pretty good shape). Painting is a lot easier when the underlying paint is still in good condition - when you have flaking and peeling, there can be a lot of extra work involved with scraping, sanding, and priming, steps you can skip if you paint when your existing paint is solid.
Painting Your Own House vs. Hiring a Painting ContractorA lot of do-it-yourselfers paint their own homes. For a one story house, or even a simple two-story house, painting really isn't rocket science. You don't need a lot of fancy or expensive equipment, though a paint sprayed makes the job go faster than the traditional brush or roller method. The hardest part is the ladders and working at heights -- trying to balance paint cans, brushes, sanders, etc. while scaling ladders up and down all day is not easy work. But if you have the time and want to save the money, go for it. Our house offered additional challenges, like several high gabled ends and layered gables, making it very difficult to get flush placement for a sturdy ladder position. Unless you are really fearless when working 20+ feet in the air, projects like these are best left to a professional painter. So that's what we did. We got 5 bids from painters we found via neighbor referrals and the yellow pages. We talked with them all, some were single-person companies, some managed 2 or 3 teams of painters and tackled projects with 3 or 4 men working at once. Most of the bids were within 5-10% of one another, while one was 50% higher than the rest -- that tells you one guy was hoping to make a killing from a gullible home owner while the rest were all fairly competitive. In the end, we went with the 3rd lowest bid, about $300 higher than the lowest, and we chose someone who came with a neighbor recommendation.Painting Your House - The ProcessPretty much every painting contractor we talked to used the same process and techniques when it came to painting the house. First step was powerwashing to remove all dirt and debris and loose paint from the house, from top to bottom. This took a couple of hours, pretty straight forward. If no cracked or peeling paint was visible before, power washing would highlight any troubled areas that needed more prep work before beginning to paint. In our case, our siding was in excellent shape, with some fading of the paint and nails showing through and some caulking issues along edges, but no cracks, chips, or peeling. However, the trim and fascia boards, especially on the south side of the house, were taking more of a beating, with lots of chips and peeling paint. So after the washing comes the sanding and scraping, where needed. For new paint to adhere properly, you need a smooth clean undersurface -- so any chipped or peeled paint needs to be scraped off and sanded to where bare wood and existing paint blend together smoothly. Depending on how far gone your paint job is, this could takes hours or 1-2 days. And once you get down to bare wood, you need to use primer to seal and protect the wood and provide a good surface for the new coat of paint. For our house, we were going from a darker old paint to a new white paint, so the decision was made to use an oil-based primer as a first coat to really cover up the old color, then apply the new latex acrylic paint as a second coat. Of course the old fashioned way of painting was to use a nice heavy brush to really get a good coat of paint on everything. But brushes can be slow and difficult to use when it comes to overhangs, high work surfaces, and all the cracks and crevices you find on a home exterior. So again, all our contractors described using the same painting technique - two coats of paints, using a spray and backroll or backbrush method to get even coverage on the siding. Spray and backroll means using the sprayer to apply the paint quickly and relatively evenly, and then going over it with either a brush or roller to get it into all the grooves and cracks of the siding, and smoothing out the finish and avoiding drips. For trim and fascia boards, small hand rollers or brushes are used. When it comes to paint, you should specify using the premium brand of any of the big paint manufacturers. Each painter we talked to preferred a different paint brand, so we don't think it matters if you go with Sherwin Williams or Behr or Benjamin Moore -- just use one of the higher grade, premium paints that will cost a little more (maybe $200 more total on your paint job) and last a LOT longer. We went even a step further for our trim and fascia boards that had taken so much damage and opted for the $50 per gallon "lifetime" paint. This stuff is thick and plasticky and really coats and sticks -- when we run our hands along it it is hard to tell the surface below is rough, splintery wood - it feels like plastic. This paint is supposed to last a LOOONNGGG time, check back with us in 15 years and we'll let you know if it is true, but it was worth the extra $100 to hopefully avoid having to paint these very high and difficult areas again for a long time. So anyways, we used oil-based primer and then acrylic latex paints for the final coat. Latex paints are a lot easier and less messy to work with compared to oils, and good acrylic paints let the siding breathe while providing a solid moisture barrier.Caulking is another item to be handled before the final coat of paint goes on. Caulking protects all the various joints and areas where wood meets wood or other materials, like windows or at edges where siding meets trim boards. All these areas should be properly caulked so no cracks or gaps exist where moisture can get into the wood. Between the caulking and the paint, you should have a solid, rain-proof shield to protect your wooden, vulnerable house. And that pretty much covers how the job went - power wash, followed by some scraping and sanding of areas that were cracked or peeling, a base coat (oil primer in our case), final caulking of any areas that need it, then a finish coat, paint being applied in a spray and backroll manner. In our case, it took a single painter a little over a week to do the whole thing. Our advice - don't wait too long for old paint to really start peeling and cracking -- at that point, you could have rot and damage to the boards and siding beneath, meaning a lot of extra expense to fix before you can even begin painting. Also, try to find a painter with local references -- these guys can really be a mixed bag, and you want to find someone that will show up on time everyday, keep the work area clean before, during, and after, and get the job done in a timely fashion. Good luck with your painting job!
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