Interior Painting in Bethesda, MD

The trim in a prewar Bethesda house is solid wood with a deep profile: molded casings, a picture rail in the older parlors, plinth blocks, paneled doors with mortise locks, and a stair with turned balusters.

The problem is build. Ten or twelve coats round over every arris, fill the quirk of a molding profile until it reads as a blob, and stop doors and windows from closing. A sash that will not budge in a Woodmont bedroom is usually paint, not swelling.

So the work on this trim is mostly subtraction. We sand the profile back enough for the detail to reappear, strip the latch edges and door stops where the build is preventing operation, fill and sand the chipped arrises, and then finish. We sand between coats on doors, which is the difference between a door that feels like furniture and one you can read with your fingertips.

Because those coats predate 1978 at the bottom, any sanding here falls under the federal RRP rule once the work disturbs more than six square feet of painted surface in a room. Maryland is not an EPA-authorized state, so the federal rule applies here directly rather than through a state program. We tell you plainly what your scope triggers. We contain, we do not dry sand into open air, and we clean up as we go.

Most prewar houses close to downtown have been added to, and the interior seam is usually a header between the old kitchen and a 1990s family room. On one side, plaster. On the other, half inch drywall.

Those two surfaces are not flush and they will never be flush. Butting the paint up against the joint makes the difference obvious. The fix is mechanical: tape the transition, feather the compound out a foot or more into the drywall side so the eye reads a plane rather than a step, and prime the whole run so suction is even. Fresh drywall compound and hundred-year-old plaster drink paint at very different rates, and an unprimed patch flashes through two finish coats.

Ceiling height usually changes at that line too. A 1998 family room with nine foot ceilings opening off a 1925 hallway with eight means the crown either stops or steps, and how you handle that transition is a decision to make before the first coat rather than after.

In the buildings that went up around the Metro station, half the job is arranged before we arrive.

• A certificate of insurance goes to your management office first. We hold Virginia contractor license 2705098145 and are licensed, bonded and insured in Virginia, and we send the paperwork to the building directly.
• The service elevator is reserved, padded and used for everything. Nothing comes through the lobby.
• The building's permitted work hours are the schedule. If the association allows work from nine to five on weekdays only, that is what we do, and we quote the job on that basis.
• The corridor between the elevator and your door gets protected, because a drip out there is the association's problem and therefore yours.

Air is the other condo issue. A unit in a sealed building with shared ventilation does not clear odor the way a house with openable windows does, and your neighbors will notice before you do. We use low odor product lines, run air movers toward the unit's own exhaust rather than the corridor, and we do not schedule a whole-unit repaint on the assumption you will be sleeping there that night.

The most common downtown jobs are a full repaint before a listing or between tenants, popcorn ceiling removal in the older buildings, and wallpaper coming out of a powder room or a dining alcove. There is no minimum job size, which matters here, because plenty of contractors sized for detached houses will not come out for one bedroom.

A four bedroom Colonial in Battery Park on a narrow lot has no spare room and no basement you would want to stack a dining set in. Sequencing matters more here than it does in a house with wings.

We move furniture to the middle and cover it rather than emptying the house, work a room at a time so you always have a place to sleep and a working kitchen, and give you a written order of rooms with the days attached. Fredy checks that order daily rather than setting it once and hoping.

Stair halls in these houses are narrow and tall at the same time, which is an awkward combination: you need staging for the height but there is no width to build it in. We use adjustable stair staging with padded feet and wrap the newel and balusters rather than leaning a ladder on a hundred-year-old rail.

Dust gets contained. Doorways sealed with plastic on the bigger jobs, vacuum-assisted sanding where the work allows, floors covered and swept at the end of every day rather than the end of the week. Take the art and anything sentimental off the walls before we start. Everything else we handle.

Fredy walks the rooms himself. He is looking at wall substrate first, then trim count and profile, then ceiling height, then whether a building is going to set the hours. Floor area is the least useful of the four.

The estimate names the repairs, the primer for each surface, the number of coats, the sheens room by room and the order of work. Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore. Fred General Painting has been doing this since 2002 out of the shop in Vienna, and it is the same four-person crew every day, so nobody has to be re-briefed on which rooms are off limits. Call 703-869-0593.