Exterior Painting in Bethesda, MD

Sumner, Westmoreland Hills, Wyngate, Bradley Hills and Glen Echo Heights are largely brick, and a great deal of that brick has been painted since the 1970s.

Painted brick is permanent. Nobody takes it back to bare successfully at a reasonable cost, so the only real decision is how to maintain it. The failure to understand is that it comes off from behind, not from the front. Brick and mortar carry moisture. If the coating on the face is too tight, that moisture cannot leave through the wall and it pops the paint off in plates, often with a thin wafer of masonry stuck to the back of each one.

So before quoting we work out what is on there. An elastomeric and a breathable mineral or acrylic masonry coating are not interchangeable, and putting the tight one over a wall that is already holding water guarantees a repeat.

Open mortar joints get repointed before anything is coated, because a coating will bridge a small gap and then tear. Downspout splash zones and the first two courses above grade are where we look first, along with the chimney, which takes weather on all four faces and is usually the worst brick on the house.

A prewar Bethesda house has original double-hung sashes, a front porch, and a lot of exposed end grain. Those are the parts that go.

Sash: the failure starts at the glazing putty. Once the putty shrinks and cracks, water sits on the bottom rail behind the glass and rots it from the inside. Reglazing is slow and it is the single highest-value thing you can do to a hundred-year-old window. We reglaze, prime the bare wood the same day it is opened up, and carry the finish a hair onto the glass to seal the edge.

Porches: the floor is the hardest surface on the house. It is horizontal, it holds water, and it gets walked on. Porch floors want a porch and floor product, real dry time between coats and a day nobody needs to use them. Columns rot at the base where they meet that floor, and the rot is usually hidden until the base trim comes off.

Other usual suspects: the bottom of corner boards, the butt ends of clapboard at the corners, window sill noses, and the fascia behind a gutter that has been packed for two seasons.

We do the carpentry and wood rot repair ourselves, so you do not hire two contractors. Soft wood comes out and is replaced with new stock, small sound areas take a two-part epoxy consolidant and filler, and every replacement piece gets primed on all six sides before it goes up. That last step costs ten minutes and doubles the life of the board.

On the old streetcar blocks the gap between your wall and the next house can be a few paces. That rules out spraying a side elevation. We brush and roll it, which is slower and is the only responsible choice when somebody else's cars, windows and air conditioner are that close.

Scraping a pre-1978 exterior is a containment operation. The federal RRP rule is triggered when a job disturbs more than twenty square feet of exterior painted surface, and Maryland is not an EPA-authorized state, so that federal threshold applies here directly. On these blocks essentially the whole stock predates 1978, so the honest assumption is that it applies.

In practice: plastic down before a scraper touches the wall, sheeting run out far enough to catch what carries, chips collected the same day rather than left over a weekend, and nothing swept toward the curb. That matters on the streets that drain toward Little Falls Branch and the Capital Crescent Trail corridor, and it matters more if you or your neighbor has a vegetable bed against the fence.

Access is the other thing we settle at the estimate. Many of these houses have no rear alley, a fence on both sides and a gate too narrow for staging. We walk the perimeter and work out how planks get to the back before committing to a start date, rather than discovering it on the first morning.

If you are in one of the buildings downtown, the exterior is not yours. Facade, balcony structure, common walkways and railings belong to the association and are maintained on the building's own cycle with the building's own contractor.

What we can do in 20814 is everything inside your door, plus balcony and terrace surfaces where the association permits owner maintenance and will confirm it in writing. We ask management first and we ask in writing. A homeowner's recollection of what the rules allow is not the same as the rules.

We push Bethesda exteriors toward the stretches with stable overnight temperatures, and on the close-in blocks we start on the elevation that gets the earliest sun so the wall has dried before a brush touches it. A wall that is still holding dew at nine is a wall we move to in the afternoon.

The estimate names substrates by elevation, the repairs before paint, the primer for each surface, the number of coats, and how the joint between old house and addition is being handled. Fredy walks the whole perimeter himself, including the side yard nobody uses, because that is where the rot usually is.

Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore. Same four-person crew every day since we have been doing this. Call 703-869-0593.