Exterior Painting in Arlington, VA

Across Arlington Forest, Bluemont, Westover and the 22205 and 22207 streets the stock is postwar brick: capes, ramblers and small colonials. Owners assume there is no exterior painting to do. There is, and it is what keeps the house looking maintained.

What we paint on an unpainted brick house is fascia, soffit, rake, frieze, window casing and brickmould, shutters, the porch ceiling, the garage door and the front door. It is a smaller project than people brace for.

Soffits are where the rot lives. The eaves are shallow, so a gutter that backs up has nowhere to overflow except into the soffit board and the fascia behind it. By the time paint is peeling off a soffit corner the wood is usually gone, and we replace it rather than face it with filler. Brickmould at the bottom corners of window casings is the other consistent one.

We get asked this on nearly every 1950s Arlington estimate. Painted brick cannot practically be returned to bare, and stripping it is expensive, messy and rarely fully successful.

Done properly it means the wall washed and dried through, efflorescence removed, failed mortar repointed, a masonry primer, and a breathable masonry coating. A vapor-tight film on a wall that wicks moisture blisters from behind, which no touch-up fixes. Limewash is the softer route because it soaks in and weathers off instead of peeling.

On a lot of these houses our advice is to leave the brick alone and put the money into the trim, the shutters and the front door. On a small cape that does more to the street view than a body color would.

Nearly every 1950s brick cape in Arlington Forest, Bluemont and Westover has iron on it: slim porch supports, a stoop railing, basement window grilles. It is the detail most often skipped on a repaint, and the one that makes an otherwise tidy house look neglected.

Iron rusts outward from the welds and joints, and from the bottom of a hollow post where water has been sitting for thirty years. Painting over active rust puts a color on top of something still working.

We take loose scale back to sound metal, prime with a rust-inhibitive or rust-converting product, and topcoat with something built for metal rather than the house paint that happens to be open. Where a post base has rusted through we say so, because coating a support that has lost its footing is not a repair.

People here hold back on repainting because they have heard the word historic and assume it means paperwork. Usually it does not.

A National Register listing, which covers Ashton Heights, Westover and others, is honorific. It does not control your colors. A local historic district, Maywood being the best known, does involve county review through a certificate of appropriateness for exterior changes. The useful part is that Arlington County lists paint colors among the exceptions to that requirement.

So repainting a Maywood house in a new color is generally not the obstacle people expect. What does change things is if the job stops being a repaint: swapping siding or trim for a different material is a separate conversation with county staff, and we flag it at the estimate if the rot we find is heading that way.

The pre-war houses carry wood that newer stock does not, and on an exterior repaint it is where the hours land.

• Double-hung wood sash. What failed is the glazing putty, not the window. Dried putty shrinks out of the rabbet, water sits in the sash rail, and the bottom rail goes soft. We reglaze, repair the rail where it can be saved, and carry paint onto the glass edge to close the seal.
• Tongue-and-groove porch ceilings. Beadboard that has opened at the joints. It needs the joints cleaned out, not caulked shut, because sealing them traps what gets in.
• Porch columns and balustrades. Bases sit in standing water and go first. Turned balusters have a hundred end grain spots that a roller will never reach.
• Eave returns and bracket details. Deep profiles that hold debris. Hand scraped so the profile survives.

A large share of Arlington households are in attached or multi-family housing: the 1940s garden apartment blocks around Westover, converted condominium units, townhouse rows. In most of those the exterior envelope belongs to the association, so the work you can commission is limited to what is genuinely yours.

That usually comes down to a front door, a storm door, a patio railing, a fence panel, or the trim on a private entry. We take those, and there is no job minimum.

Where an association does hire us for a building or a row, we supply a certificate of insurance, work inside the hours the management company sets, and keep walkways and common landings clear at the end of each day. Fredy Vargas prices the work and is on site while it runs. Virginia contractor license 2705098145. Call 703-869-0593.