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Go outside and put your bare hand flat on the siding, on the sunny side of the house, about shoulder height. Drag it down a foot. If your palm comes away dusty, like you just handled a piece of sidewalk chalk, the paint is telling you something.
That powder is not dirt. It is the paint film itself coming apart, and it is the earliest honest signal a homeowner gets.
Most people looking up when to repaint the exterior of a house want a number of years. The number is not much use. Two houses on the same road, built the same year and painted the same summer, can fail years apart depending on which way they face and what is underneath the paint. The wall is a better source than the calendar.
What follows is what we look at when we walk a house, in the order the failures usually show up. You can check every one of them yourself in about 10 minutes, and you do not need a ladder for most of it.
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Written By: Taylor A. Baity
The crew is coming Monday, and it is Sunday afternoon. You have hired painters before, so the work itself isn't what's on your mind. You're standing in the living room wondering how much of this you are supposed to move, and whether anybody is going to tell you.
That's the question behind most searches for how to prepare for house painting, and it has a short answer. You clear the small stuff. We handle the big stuff. You take down what is hanging on the walls, empty the shelves and counters, and decide where the pets and the people are going to be. We move the furniture, cover it, mask the trim, and protect the floors.
Below is the detail, room by room, plus what to do about pets and what you can stop thinking about entirely.
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Written By: Taylor A. Baity
There is a half-full can of exterior paint sitting on a shelf in the shed, and the hallway needs a touch-up. It looks like a fair trade. The interior vs exterior paint question comes up on almost every job we quote, and it usually arrives phrased as "paint is paint, right?"
It isn't, and the difference has nothing to do with marketing. The two products are built on different resins and carry different additives. Exterior paint has to move with the wood through a January freeze and an August afternoon. Interior paint has to survive a mop, a dog, and a kid with a backpack.
Short answer: don't cross them. Below is what is actually in each can, why exterior paint has to flex, why interior paint gives up fast outdoors, and what you can expect to see when the two get swapped.
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Written By: Taylor A. Baity
The same thing happens to almost every homeowner. You find a color you love, buy a gallon, roll a wall, and the next morning it looks nothing like it did in the store. Most interior paint color tips skip past that and hand you a trend list instead. The useful advice starts one step earlier, with the light in the room, because light is what decides whether the color on the chip is the color you get.
A color is not a fixed thing sitting in a can. It is what bounces off the wall and reaches your eye, and the room controls most of that.
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Written By: Taylor A. Baity