Exterior Painting in Falls Church, VA

Pimmit Hills broke ground in 1950: more than 1,600 small houses, three bedrooms, one bath, near identical plans. A large share of them got re-sided in aluminum or vinyl in the seventies and eighties, and that siding is now the surface we are asked to paint.

Aluminum oxidizes. Run your hand along it and your palm comes away chalky gray. Nothing sticks to that powder. We wash with detergent and keep washing until a rag comes off the wall clean, then use a bonding primer, then an acrylic finish. Skip the wash and the new coat will come off in sheets the size of a panel.

Two more notes on aluminum. It dents, and dents read badly under any sheen above satin, so we keep the body low. And on vinyl the rule is firm: at or lighter than the existing color, in a vinyl-safe product, because a dark color heats the panel and warping is permanent.

Broadmont, Greenway Downs and Virginia Forest are mostly 1930s to 1950s stock, and the trim on those houses has been painted every eight or ten years since. What we find:

• Wood soffit, fascia and rake boards carrying eight or nine coats, with the seams now holding water instead of shedding it
• Original sills and brickmould gone soft, worst on the south and west
• The bottom four inches of exterior door casing and the garage door jambs, where splashback has rotted the end grain
• Porch ceilings and column bases on the Capes, where the paint is being pushed off from behind

Rot gets cut out and replaced with new stock, primed on all six sides including the cut ends. Almost everything in the established parts of town predates 1978, so we do not dry sand or power grind aged coatings. We wash, scrape wet, contain the debris and prime bare wood the same day it is opened. On lots this narrow that matters to your neighbor as much as it matters to you.

A 1954 rambler comes down and a six-bedroom house goes up on the same lot. It has been happening inside the city and along the edges of Idylwood and Pimmit Hills for years now.

Those houses usually carry stucco or a synthetic stucco system on the front, stone at the base, and fiber cement around the sides. They do not fail in the field. They fail at the joints: over window heads, at the base of a column, where the stucco runs into a roof line without a kickout. Water gets behind and nothing shows until something stains inside.

We repair stucco as well as coat it, and on a five-year-old house that is a small piece of work that prevents a large one. The fiber cement is the easy part, with one exception: cut ends at the butt joints are routinely left unsealed by the installer, and those get primed before anything else.

Infill footprints are large and the parcels are not. On plenty of these jobs there are four or five feet between the wall and the neighbor's fence, often with a mature oak in the middle of it.

A ladder needs level footing and a working angle, and neither is available in a strip that narrow. Sometimes we plank over the fence line with permission, sometimes we reach that elevation from the corner instead. It is worth settling at the estimate rather than the first morning.

Proximity changes how we coat, too. With a neighbor's car twelve feet from the wall, we brush and roll where another crew would spray, and we mask the fence line regardless. Overspray is not something you apologize for later.

Fredy Vargas comes out himself with a ladder and looks at the seams, not just the walls. On these houses the price turns on how much wood has to be replaced, and that is not a thing anyone can judge from the ground or from a photograph.

Fred General Painting has been at this since 2002. Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured. We are on Trevor Place in Vienna, about fifteen minutes up Route 7. Monday through Friday, 8 to 5, weekends by arrangement. No job minimum, so a set of shutters or one bad sill is a normal call. Veterans and anyone 65 or older take 10 percent off. Call 703-869-0593.