Exterior Painting Booked Inside the Curing Window

An exterior coating needs a surface warm enough to form a film, and in this valley that means roughly fifty degrees and holding, read on the wall rather than off a weather app. It also needs a dew point that is not sitting right under the surface temperature, because siding that sweats overnight traps moisture under a coat that went on at four in the afternoon. That is what decides the method, not whether we take the job. A standard coat applied too cold looks fine in November, then never cross links, never gets its adhesion, and lets go in sheets along the south wall by the first warm week of spring. So in the cold we switch products to a film formulated to cure down near thirty five degrees, work the sun side of the building through the warmest hours of the day, and tent and heat the wall where the surface will not come up on its own. That costs more than the same house in June. You get both numbers written down and you choose which one you are buying.

The walls do not weather evenly either. South and west take the sun and the driven rain, so the coating there usually runs two or three years ahead of the north side, and pricing a house as one round number without reading each elevation misses that entirely. Clapboard opens at the butt joints. Cedar shingle goes chalky and thins out along the exposed edge. A porch ceiling peels from the top down when an ice dam has been pushing water back under the roof edge, and that is a roof problem wearing paint problem clothes. We walk all four sides, look at the trim caulk, the window aprons, the gutter line and the sills, and tell you which parts are paint and which parts are carpentry before a number goes on paper.

What the visit covers

• Wash the siding and let it dry through before prep starts
• Scrape and sand every failing edge back to sound paint
• Sound the trim, sills and porch posts and call out the rot
• Prime bare wood the same day the surface gets opened
• Cut out failed caulk and reseal trim, corners and joints
• Reseat loose glazing putty at old sash and storm windows
• Mask roofs, decks, walkways and anything planted at the wall
• Coat one elevation at a time, working behind the shade
• Brush clapboard butts, shingle edges and window trim by hand
• Flag the gutter or downspout line that is soaking the wall

What we will not paint over

Paint over rot is money burned, and it is the most common thing we find on a house that got a cheap coating last time. A soft bottom rail on a window, a punky column base where the porch floor holds water, a sill that gives under a screwdriver, a corner board gone spongy behind an old bead of sealant. Coating hides all of that for a year, then the coating fails and the wood underneath is worse than it was. We sound the trim with a tool instead of judging it by eye, and anything soft gets flagged with a price to cut it out and replace it before prep carries on. If you would rather bring in your own carpenter, that is fine, we hold the schedule and work around them.

The order never changes. Wash first, so nothing gets sealed under the film, then give the wood a day or two to dry depending on what the weather is doing. Scrape and sand back to a sound edge and feather the transitions, so a repaint does not read as a map of every old failure. Get primer on bare wood the same day it is exposed, because raw wood left open over a weekend takes on moisture and whatever follows never bonds properly. Caulk after primer rather than before it, so the sealant grips a sealed surface. Then coats go on, elevation by elevation, following the shade around the house so nothing flashes in direct sun. Surfaces and number of coats sit on the written scope before a ladder goes up.