Exterior Painting in Herndon, VA
Two very different exteriors carry a Herndon address: century-old wood downtown, where the color may need a Certificate of Appropriateness, and vinyl-sided subdivisions west of the town line, where it needs your association.
The town line decides who has a say in your color
The incorporated Town of Herndon covers a little over four square miles. The 20170 and 20171 ZIP codes run well past it into Fairfax County, so a Herndon address tells you nothing on its own.
Inside the historic district boundary, most exterior changes need a Certificate of Appropriateness before work starts. The town publishes the Herndon Historic District Guidelines and the Downtown Herndon Pattern Book, and staff at 777 Lynn Street will confirm whether your property sits inside the line and what your project needs. Outside the town, the Review Board has no role, though a homes association usually does.
We are painters, not your representative before the board. We will not file for you and we will never tell you an approval is a formality. What we will do is paint exactly to what gets approved, and give you a straight opinion beforehand about what will actually hold up on a hundred-year-old wood facade.
A century of paint on a porch bracket
The historic district went on the National Register in 1991 with 173 contributing buildings, most of them put up between 1890 and 1920. Walk from the 1857 board-and-batten depot up Station Street and along Elden and you are looking at wood siding, turned posts, sawn brackets and molded trim that have been coated and recoated for over a century.
That work is done by hand. A sander or a grinder takes the profile off a bead or a bracket in about four seconds, and once the crisp edge is gone nobody can put it back. So we scrape, we spot prime, and we feather the margins so the repaint does not read as a patchwork from the sidewalk.
Everything of that age predates 1978 by a wide margin. We do not dry sand or power grind aged coatings. We scrape wet, sheet the ground, contain what comes off and clean up at the end of each day.
Glazing putty fails long before the paint does
Old wood sash is where a downtown exterior is really won or lost. The putty bed shrinks, cracks and falls out of the lower corners first, and then water sits against the glazing rabbet and the bottom rail every time it rains.
Painting over a dried, broken putty line and calling the window done is the most common shortcut we get called in to undo. We rake the failed putty out, prime the bare rabbet, reglaze, let it skin, and then run the finish coat a hair onto the glass so the seal is actually made rather than stopped short of it.
Fox Mill, Kingstream and the committee palette
West and south of the town line the picture changes completely. Fox Mill Estates is 1,120 single-family houses built between 1972 and 1985 on quarter to half acre lots inside Lawyers Road, Reston Parkway, West Ox Road, Fox Mill Road and the Fairfax County Parkway, with a homes association holding 57 acres of common land. Kingstream sits off Dranesville Road, Herndon Chase near the high school, Monroe Manor is mostly 1990s, and Great Falls Chase mixes 106 detached houses with 336 townhouses.
Before you settle on anything, read your covenants. Several of these communities run an architectural committee, and the townhouse rows are frequently on a fixed list for body, trim and door. One phone call now is cheaper than repainting a front door in October because a letter arrived.
Vinyl siding takes paint, up to a point
Most of these houses are vinyl, and vinyl can be painted properly. What it cannot do is go darker.
The panel absorbs heat, and vinyl that gets hotter than it was designed to get will expand, buckle and stay buckled. So the rule is at or lighter than the existing color, in a coating formulated as vinyl safe. There is a reasonable range of those now and we will show you where the ceiling is for your particular siding.
Prep is a wash, and a real one. Vinyl holds an oxidized chalk film that nothing sticks to, and the north side usually carries a green algae film on top of that. We wash, let it dry all the way through the laps, then prime where the surface needs it. Painting also does not fix vinyl that has cracked, gone brittle or pulled off its nailing hem. Those panels get replaced first.
Aluminum-wrapped trim and the pine hiding inside it
Subdivision houses of this era came with coil stock wrapped over the wood trim. It looks maintenance free, which is the trap. Once a seam has opened, a corner has been dented by a ladder, or a nail hole has never been sealed, water goes in behind the aluminum and stays there. The wrap looks fine from the ground while the wood inside it turns to pulp.
We open the suspect ones rather than coating over them. Underneath is usually finger-jointed pine, and finger-jointed pine fails at the glue lines: they telegraph, then they open, then the end grain drinks.
The order of failure is consistent. Garage door frames, window sills, and the bottom two inches of any trim board. That is carpentry, not a bead of caulk, and we do it ourselves so there is no gap in the schedule with bare wood sitting open.
The west wall does more damage than the other three combined
Herndon sits on rolling ground with heavy canopy along Sugarland Run and the W&OD corridor, so the north side of a house stays shaded and the west side takes full afternoon sun with nothing in the way.
That west elevation and the south gable are where the color fades, where the caulk joints stretch and pull apart, and where the coating chalks first. On most houses here those two faces need more attention than the other two put together, and we schedule around not laying paint onto a wall while the sun is on it.
Our exterior season runs roughly April into November. In the shoulder months we watch the overnight low rather than the daytime high. A coat that goes on at 60 degrees and is at 42 by midnight has not finished forming its film, and it will never harden the way the label says.
One honest note about our schedule out here
We are based at 8040 Trevor Place in Vienna, and Herndon is at the outer edge of what we cover. Lead times out there run longer than they do closer in, particularly in spring and early fall. We would rather say that up front than keep you waiting on a date we are not going to hit. Once we start, we stay on your house until it is finished.
Fredy Vargas started the company in 2002 and is on site daily. Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured. Monday to Friday 8 to 5, weekends by appointment. No job minimum, so one rotted sill or a set of shutters is a normal call. Veterans and anyone 65 or older take 10 percent off. Call 703-869-0593.
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Ready when you are.
Fred answers his own phone. If he is up a ladder he calls back the same evening.