Exterior Painting in Springfield, VA

Push out Old Keene Mill Road and Rolling Road into Cardinal Forest, Monticello Woods, Rolling Valley and Orange Hunt and the seventies siding takes over. Hardboard lap, plywood panel and T1-11 with its grooves.

These materials are fine when they are sound and finished, and they fail in a specific pattern:

• Swelling along the bottom edge of a panel or a lap course, where the cut edge has been drinking splash for years. That edge is furry and thicker than the rest of the board.
• Delamination around a nail head, where the face has lifted into a small blister.
• Open grooves on T1-11 that were never primed inside, holding water down the length of the wall.

Sound boards we clean, spot prime and coat, and they last. Swollen or delaminated boards do not come back, and paint over them is money on a surface that is already finished. We say which is which at the estimate and replace what needs replacing ourselves.

Plenty of houses here have been resided in vinyl, or have vinyl on the gable ends and the rear. It takes paint with the right primer and an acrylic rated for it.

The constraint is heat, not adhesion. Vinyl expands with temperature, and a shade meaningfully darker than what is on the wall now absorbs more sun than the panel was designed to take. It can buckle, and it does not come back. You can go the same depth or lighter, and vinyl-safe formulations extend the range a little. We will tell you where that line is rather than taking the order and hoping for a cool summer.

The two-story colonials through Kings Park, Hunt Valley and Pohick Hills have hundreds of feet of sealed joint: siding to corner board, trim to brick, window casing to sill, garage jamb to the opening. Caulk fails quietly. The bead splits at the back where you cannot see it, water runs behind the trim, and the paint on the face still looks respectable while the wood behind it goes.

We cut out dead sealant and replace it rather than running a fresh bead over a hard one, which is the most common shortcut on an exterior and the reason some houses need doing again in four years.

The other standing problem on this era is finger-jointed pine. Fascia, corner boards, window sills and garage jambs were built up from short lengths, and every finger joint eventually opens. Filler does not hold a moving joint. Those sections get replaced.

One thing we do not seal: the bottom horizontal edge of lap siding. That gap is how a wall drains.

Where I-95, I-395 and the Beltway meet is close enough to a good part of town to matter, and so is the Backlick Road and Franconia Road corridor.

The walls facing that traffic carry a fine gray deposit of brake dust, tire rubber and exhaust residue. It is not loose dirt and rain does not take it off. Coating over it is an adhesion problem waiting to appear, so on those houses we wash with detergent and enough contact time to break the film, then rinse and let the wall dry properly before anything else happens.

The same deposit is why white trim on a house near the corridor looks tired years before the coating has actually failed. Sometimes the right recommendation is a wash and a trim repaint rather than a whole exterior, and we would rather say that than quote you the big number.

Closer to Backlick Road and the old rail line the houses are ranchers, ramblers and Cape Cods, usually brick or partial brick with painted wood on the rest. The painted area is small and almost all of it is awkward.

A rambler has a shallow overhang, so the frieze board and the top course of siding get weather a colonial never sees. The house also sits low, which puts the bottom course, the carport posts and any wood skirting in the splash line off the beds and the drive. On the Cape Cods the dormer cheeks are the worst paint on the house, because they are above the gutter, too small to reach from a stepladder and consistently skipped.

Some still have their original steel windows. They paint well, but only after degreasing and a metal-suitable primer.