Exterior Painting in Annandale, VA

The long low houses through Camelot, Woodburn and Canterbury Woods have brick across the front and painted material down the sides and back. People see that and assume a small job. The square footage is small. The labor is not.

What we are painting on a rambler is fascia, soffit, rake boards, frieze, window casing, shutters, the front door, the carport posts and the garage surround. Every one of those is a cut line, and cut lines are brush work.

Ramblers also sit low. The bottom course of siding is close enough to the beds that every rain throws soil back onto it, and mulch piled against a wall keeps it permanently damp. That bottom eight inches is the first place we look for soft material.

The split levels and bi-levels through Sleepy Hollow Woods, Hillbrook-Tall Oaks and Bristow Village have one tall face where the half-story jump stacks up, usually the end gable. That is the wall that gets skipped.

It gets skipped because it needs staging. A ladder against a two-and-a-half story gable on sloping ground is how people get hurt and how you get a wobbly cut line at the rake. We build a platform so the crew stands level while they work the siding, the rake, the gable vent and the trim.

Expect that wall to need more prep than the rest of the house combined. After fifteen or twenty years the coating there has chalked, checked and in places let go, and the rake board ends are usually the first wood we replace on the property.

After twenty-four years on 1950s and 60s stock the list barely changes street to street:

• Fascia downhill from a leaking gutter joint. Then the rake board, then the soffit corner. Almost always the same corner of the house, the low end of the gutter run.
• Window sills with no drip edge left. Sixty years of standing water. We replace the sill rather than filling it, because filler on a board that has gone soft through its thickness is a cosmetic delay.
• Carport posts and breezeway framing. The bases sit on concrete that stays wet and rot upward while the tops look new.
• Garage door jambs and the trim behind downspouts. Both hidden, both consistently the worst wood on the property.

Fred does the carpentry as part of the same job, so you are not hiring a carpenter, waiting on him, then losing your weather window. New stock gets primed on all six faces, cut ends included, before it goes up.

This is the real difference between Annandale and the planned communities west of here. No association covers most of 22003. A few pockets do have a say: Sleepy Hollow Woods runs an architectural committee from covenants written in 1959, and Broyhill Crest has a community association. Everywhere else the only approval you need is your own.

Freedom is harder than it sounds and people stall for months. So we brush out real samples on your actual siding, on two elevations, and look at them morning and late afternoon before anybody commits. Under this much oak canopy a color reads cooler and greener than it does in the open, and a soft gray picked off a chip in a store routinely comes out blue on the shaded side. The brick front is the other constraint: your body color has to sit next to masonry nobody is changing.

Holmes Run Acres went up between 1951 and 1960 to designs by Nicholas Satterlee and Francis Lethbridge, and the houses show their frame on purpose. That is a different exterior job than anything else in town.

Exposed beam ends are end grain aimed outward and they drink water, so they get primed on the end grain rather than wiped with a topcoat. Flat and low-slope roof edges mean the fascia holds water instead of shedding it, so that board is usually on the replacement list.

The siding is wide unbroken plank, which shows every lap mark and dry edge, so we brush and back-roll rather than spraying and walking away. The houses also have large glass, so your cut lines at the window frames get looked at from inside every room.

Oak and tulip poplar over these lots keep the north and east walls damp for hours after sunrise, and a biological film means the new coat releases no matter what it cost. Every house gets a mildewcidal wash, real dry time, and mildew resistance in the film on the problem elevations.

The other thing the canopy does is drop tannin. Brown weeping streaks down light siding are not rot and they are not dirt, and a second finish coat will not bury them. Those want a stain-blocking primer on the affected boards before any color goes back.

Fredy Vargas walks the house and gives you an honest start date. Virginia contractor license 2705098145. Call 703-869-0593.