Exterior Painting FAQ's
Residential Painting
Have you ever wondered why we sand houses to bare wood?
What equipment do we use to sand a house?
Do you sand my trim to bare wood?
What about all the wires on my house?
Do I need to strip my house every time I paint?
Q: Have you ever wondered why we sand houses to bare wood?
On older homes, the bottom coat of paint starts peeling. The first layer of paint on the house, the one that was applied 30 years ago or longer, has finally failed and needs to be removed. After years of protecting your home, the paint has become brittle and is cracking because of the expansion and contraction of the siding. If we paint on top of old paint once it has passed it's lifespan, our paint job will only be as good as the one it is sitting on.
Q: What equipment do we use to sand a house?
We use Hepa Vacuums attached to our sander with a hose and shroud to help collect the dust created by sanding.
We estimate that 80%-90% of the dust created by stripping your home stays within the system. We use large tarps to collect the majority of the rest. The system is not perfect and does not collect 100% of the dust, however it is a vast improvement over the older "open sanding" techniques used in the past.
In this picture you can see us using a 7 inch disc sander to remove paint and smooth out the cedar clapboard. We sand your siding three times. Once with a rough grit disc to remove the paint. A second time with a smoother grit to remove most of the sanding marks and level differences. After the first two sandings, we powerwash, scrape off the corners and prime your home. When the primer has dried, we go around your house a third time and hand sand it to remove the rough appearance from the cedar.
Q: How much paint can we remove?
We use Hepa Vacuums when we strip a house. There is a large vacuum that sits in your yard and connects to our sander with a hose. The sanders have a shroud on them to funnel the dust into the hose. This is a great system for collecting dust. We estimate that we contain 80%-90% of the dust from the sanding.
The one downside of this system is that we can not remove paint from small areas. In the picture above, you can see that we were not able to remove paint from the small pieces of siding between the door frame and the window frame. These areas get scraped and sanded by hand, but the majority of the paint in these areas will remain on the house.
Q: Do you sand my trim to bare wood?
Trim differs from your siding mostly in that it is not flat and wide. We are not able to fit our sanders on most pieces of trim.
In this picture you can see that we were only able to strip the paint from the flat pieces of trim near the uppermost roof line. Since the window trim is curved, we scrape and hand sand the peeling the paint. Most of the paint remains on the trim.
We also rarely strip the underside of soffits. Soffits are protected from the elements by the roof. It is also very difficult for the workers to use the machines over their heads for prolonged periods of time.
Q: What about all the wires on my house?
We like our painters so we avoid your power lines and your electrical box. If you want us to work behind them we recommend that you contact a licensed electrician to either move them or disable the power while we are working.
We remove loose telephone lines and cable lines, work behind them and then re-attach them when we are finished. We paint everything the same color as your siding to help conceal it. We remove your leaders, but not your gutters, when we paint.
We can remove any old telephone lines, cable lines or unused hardware from your home if you wish. We frequently remove old antennas from the homes we are working on.
Q: Do I need to strip my house every time I paint?
In this picture, the original home is on the left side and a recent addition is on the right side. We needed to strip the old siding down to bare wood to provide a good painting surface. The addition is approximately 10 years old and the paint was in great shape.
The addition still needed to be painted, but it did not need to be stripped. There were small sections of it that were peeling, the caulk lines had broken and there was some mildew growing on it. However, after some light prep work, it is still a great base to put the next several paint jobs on top of.
After we strip your house to bare wood, you will not need to strip it again for 20-30 years. You will still need to paint it every 6-8 years, but it won't need to be stripped.
Yes, we powerwash your home.
After sanding the paint off your siding, powerwashing is an important step in rinsing the dust off your house. Some companies will use a broom or a blower to remove the dust, but we feel that while those techniques can be effective, they tend to introduce too much dust into the air.
The powerwashing we do after sanding your home is just a light rinse. In addition, we soak your trim with bleach and powerwash it at the same time to make sure it is clean enough to paint on.
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