Exterior Painting in Fairfax, VA

Most of the city outside Old Town went up after the war and you can read it by street. Mosby Woods is a large 1960s subdivision of colonials and split levels, and Country Club Hills, Cobbdale, Fairchester Woods, Westmore, Little River Hills, Fairfax Heights and Comstock belong to the same wave.

They share a specific set of exterior problems:

• Shutters painted so many times they no longer sit flat. They come off, the built-up edges get taken back, and every face including the back gets coated before rehanging.
• Aluminum gutters over soft wood fascia. The metal looks fine and hides the board behind it. We pull a section to check rather than guessing.
• Garage door surrounds rotting at the base. Splashback off the driveway apron, every storm, for sixty years.
• Painted brick foundation courses peeling. Grade sloping toward the house pushes water at that band, and no coating outlasts standing moisture.
• Cedar and plywood siding on the split levels recoated repeatedly rather than maintained, so the film is thicker than the checking underneath.

On the older frame houses near Main Street, around Van Dyck Park on Old Lee Highway and toward Daniels Run, the windows are real wood sash with divided lights and putty glazing. They are worth keeping and they are the fastest thing on the house to fail once the film breaks.

The putty dries, shrinks and drops out of the rabbet. Water then sits on the bottom rail and the sash rots from the inside while the outside still looks painted. We rake out the dead material, prime the bare rabbet, reglaze, and carry the paint a hair onto the glass so the seal is genuinely closed. That last detail is skipped constantly and it is the whole point.

The deep front porches want the same attention. Porch floors take standing water and foot traffic, so they need a floor-rated coating rather than wall paint. Column bases sit in the wet and rot from the bottom up while the capital looks new.

The newer pockets, Farrcroft and Great Oaks inside the city and the 1980s and 90s streets running west into 22033, brought stucco and synthetic stucco with them, usually as banding and window surrounds on an otherwise sided house.

Those details are where water gets in. Synthetic stucco cracks at the corners of openings first, because that is where the wall moves most. A crack you can see is taking water, and painting over it makes it invisible rather than closed.

So we open and patch before any coating goes on. Hairline cracking takes an elastomeric patch. Cracking that runs in a line off a window corner, or a soft spot under a band, says water has been behind the system, and that is a repair conversation before it is a paint one. We say so rather than coating it and leaving.

The city is small, a bit over six square miles, and the older core is walkable. During the Fall Festival or the Chocolate Lovers Festival a good part of Fairfax goes past your front steps on foot at three feet, not at thirty miles an hour from the street.

At walking distance people see the cut line at the brickmould, the edge of the porch ceiling, the front door jamb and the handrail. So the front elevation gets brushed by hand, the door comes off its hinges where it can, and the hardware comes off rather than being masked.

It also changes the schedule. We try not to leave a half-scraped front facade sitting through a weekend on these blocks. Ladders come down and the site gets swept every evening.

The sequence is the same on every house: wash first so we can see the substrate, scrape to sound edges, feather the margins, replace bad wood instead of filling it, prime bare wood the day it is exposed, then coat.

What varies is how many finish coats you need. Going from a dark body color to something lighter on a Mosby Woods split level is two coats and sometimes wants a tinted primer first. A repaint in the same color family over a sound, well-adhered finish with full prep under it can genuinely be one coat, and we say so instead of billing for a coat you do not need.

Fredy Vargas founded the company in 2002 and still looks at the house himself. He checks the fascia behind the gutter, the shutter backs, the garage surround, the sash rails and the foundation band, and tells you what he found before there is a number on paper.

Four employees, the same crew from the first day to the last. Virginia contractor license 2705098145, bonded and insured. No job minimum, so one elevation, a set of shutters or a front door is a call worth making. We are at 8040 Trevor Place in Vienna, straight down Chain Bridge Road. Call 703-869-0593.