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Interior Painting in Alexandria, VA
Inside an Alexandria house, the build date decides the work: plaster on brick in Old Town, plaster and lath in Del Ray, drywall everywhere built after the war. We sort out which one you have before we quote it.
The Board of Architectural Review has nothing to say about your living room
Old Town and Parker-Gray owners calling about interior work usually open with a question about approvals. They have been through a Certificate of Appropriateness on a front door and assume the same applies indoors.
It does not. The Board reviews exterior changes visible from public places. Wall color, trim color, ceilings, a stairwell, a kitchen: none of it is reviewable. The only person you have to agree with is whoever else lives in the house.
That changes the calendar. People arrive expecting to wait for a meeting and instead we book the work directly. What the age of the house does control is what sits behind the paint.
A rowhouse is three floors of stairwell and nowhere flat to stand
Old Town rowhouses are narrow, deep and tall. The stair runs from the entry hall to the top floor in short flights with winders, and on most of them there is no landing wide enough to set a ladder on level ground.
That wall is also the one everybody looks at, usually lit from a transom or a skylight at the top. Raking light down the full height means every roller lap shows from the bottom step. We stage it on adjustable-leg platforms so the crew stands square to the wall, then roll the whole height in one pass rather than in sections.
The depth of these houses has its own effect. Two exterior walls, front and back, and daylight only from the ends. The same color in the front parlor and the back room will not read the same, and the middle of the house gets almost nothing. We brush out samples at both ends before anybody commits.
Plaster hung on a brick party wall behaves like neither
In an Old Town rowhouse the side walls are masonry shared with the house next door, plaster applied straight onto brick or onto thin furring. No stud cavity, no give, no air gap.
Two things follow. Cracking runs in fine map patterns rather than the straight diagonals drywall gives you, and lightweight compound smeared over it opens again by the next heating season. We cut those out, fill with a setting compound and skim wide enough that the repair disappears under a low-angle light.
The other is damp. Masonry wicks, and near grade on the lowest floor you will sometimes find a wall that keeps returning a stain or a soft chalky patch no matter what goes on it. Paint is not the answer. Usually it is a downspout, a grade problem or failed mortar, sometimes on the neighbor's side of the wall. We say so rather than sell a coating that buys one winter.
Picture rails, deep baseboards and the wallpaper under the latex
Del Ray and Rosemont are streetcar-era blocks, and the interiors show it. Plaster and lath, picture rail set a foot or so below the ceiling, baseboards six or eight inches tall with a cap, and window and door casing with a real profile on it.
All of that trim is time. A room with a picture rail has three cut lines on every wall instead of one, and we quote it that way.
Wallpaper is the other standing feature here. Somebody in 1985 painted over the paper in the dining room, and the tell is a faint seam telegraphing every four feet or a bubble at a corner. Painting again adds weight to something already letting go. We take it off, wash the paste out, skim where the face tore, seal with an oil or shellac primer, then paint.
Fairlington and Parkfairfax: the paperwork comes before the drop cloths
A large share of the interior work we do with an Alexandria address is in the 1940s garden communities and the condominium buildings. The unit is yours, but the way we get into it is not.
What that involves, and we handle all of it before day one:
- A certificate of insurance naming your association and management company, issued to whatever wording they ask for.
- Permitted work hours, which in most buildings here rule out early starts and any weekend noise.
- Service elevator reservation in the mid-rise and high-rise buildings, and a loading arrangement where there is no dock.
- Protection on common stairs, corridors and lobby flooring on the way in and out, not just inside your door.
Inside a garden unit the surfaces are older than the building looks. Plaster walls, arched doorways, plaster returns at the window reveals, and rooms small enough that furniture has to leave rather than move to the middle. There is no job minimum here, so a one-bedroom is work we will take.
Hollin Hills, where a whole wall is glass
The Goodman houses on the Fairfax County side are an interior job unlike anything else with this mailing address. Wide runs of floor-to-ceiling glass, ceilings that follow the roof plane, very little trim, and wood that was always meant to be wood.
The cut lines are the difficulty. Where paint meets a glass wall there is no casing to hide behind, and the line is read from the room and from the garden. Where a sloped ceiling meets a wall there is often no molding either. Those get cut by hand, slowly.
We also say no on these houses more than most. If your ceiling planks or paneling are original and sound, painting them cannot be walked back. We finish the drywall around them and leave the wood alone unless you have thought hard about it.
Getting a crew and materials in with no driveway
On the streets off King and Queen there is nowhere to park, the sidewalks are brick, and your front door opens onto the public way with no hall to stage in. Interior work still has to land somewhere.
We keep the footprint small. Materials stay in the van and come in by the day rather than stacking in your entry. The path from the door to the work is run and taped before anything is carried, because the first floor in these houses is usually original heart pine and a dragged bucket leaves a mark you will see forever. We clean at the end of each day and sweep the stoop and the sidewalk too. Your neighbor's steps are eighteen inches from yours and they did not hire us.
Old layers on trim in a house built before 1978
Most of Old Town, Parker-Gray, Rosemont and Del Ray predates 1978, so older coating layers on trim and doors matter on any interior job involving sanding.
Where the work is regulated, it gets handled the way the rules require rather than worked around. We treat those surfaces carefully as a matter of course: no unnecessary dry sanding or open scraping, sheeting and containment around the work, and a proper cleanup daily rather than dust left to travel through the house.
Fred walks the rooms with you first and says what he intends to disturb and what he will leave alone. If the situation calls for a specialist beyond what we do, we say that too. Virginia contractor license 2705098145. Call 703-869-0593.
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