Reading Colonials, Painted With the Prep First

A Reading exterior is a calendar problem before it is a paint problem. The older houses along Summer Avenue and around the common are colonials and Victorians with clapboard, wood trim, porch rails and sash that all want a surface above fifty degrees before a coat goes on, and a standard coat put on below that never forms properly, which turns up as early failure on the exact elevations that already take the most weather. In the cold we get the surface there instead of guessing: coatings built to cure down near thirty five degrees, the sun side worked through the warmest hours, and the wall tented and heated when the number calls for it. You see what that adds before you book. Inside the house, nothing about the calendar matters at all. These houses have plaster over lath, wide casings, deep baseboards and paneled doors, and every one of those is brush work. Radiator heat leaves a dull band on the plaster above each unit that nobody notices until the room is repainted around it. Old hardwood in the front hall carries a winter haze that wants a neutral product on a nearly dry pad worked along the boards, never a bucket of water.

Downtown Reading is a compact retail and professional district, and compact is the operative word. Haven Street and the blocks around it hold narrow storefronts, shared party walls, apartments above shops and a sidewalk that is busy from the morning train onward. Painting or cleaning there means loading in through a short window, keeping the sidewalk clear, and getting staging down before the district wakes up. Salons, dental practices, law and accounting offices, small kitchens: all of them go dark at different hours, and the scope is written to whichever one applies. Out on Walkers Brook Drive the buildings are large format retail with tall glass, wide entries and painted steel, which is lift work rather than ladder work. Churches, town buildings and the schools do their work in the summer and over the February and April vacation weeks, and they usually want the masonry included in the same scope, since the granite steps and brick entries on a nineteenth century building here have gone a long time without pointing. We sequence that ahead of the paint on purpose, so nobody coats a wall that is about to be opened up.

What we take on in Reading

• House cleaning, deep cleans and recurring visits
• Move in and move out cleaning for owners and landlords
• Post construction and renovation handover cleaning
• Pre sale cleaning before the photos and the first showing
• Interior and exterior painting, and cabinet refinishing
• Repointing, chimneys, steps, walkways and patios
• Pressure washing for siding, driveways, decks and storefronts
• Offices, retail, practices and restaurants around your hours
• Common areas and unit turnovers for property managers

Getting a price

Every quote for Reading starts with somebody standing in the actual place. Square footage over the phone is a guess, and on a wall it is worse than a guess, because the failure depth only shows when you put a hand on the joint. You get the scope written out area by area and one number for the job, usually the same business day.