Interior Painting in Chevy Chase, MD

Every one of these houses predates 1978, so the federal RRP rule is live indoors, and the interior threshold is what surprises people: more than six square feet of painted surface disturbed in a room. Maryland is not an EPA-authorized state, so the federal rule applies directly rather than through a state program.

Six square feet is a single door slab and its casing. It is two windows' worth of stool and apron. It is a short run of baseboard in a hall. If your scope involves sanding old trim to a decent standard, and in a house like this it will, you are over that threshold in the first room.

What that changes about how a room gets set up:

• The room gets isolated rather than draped. Plastic at the doorway, floors covered edge to edge, and furniture either out or sheeted and sealed instead of pushed to the middle.
• Sanding is done wet or with vacuum extraction at the tool where the work allows it, not dry with a block and an open window.
• Debris gets collected as we go and at the end of each day, not swept into a pile that sits over a weekend.
• Heat guns stay in the truck.

It is a fair question to put to any contractor quoting old trim, and worth checking the answer. What we will do is tell you plainly which parts of your scope the rule covers and work clean because the house is occupied.

Almost every house here still has cast iron radiators, usually one under each window, usually painted, and frequently painted with something that has since gone yellow, brittle or both.

Radiators are their own small job and they are worth doing properly. The surface has to be cleaned and deglossed, loose material removed, bare cast iron spot primed with a product rated for metal, and the finish chosen for heat. Ordinary wall paint on a radiator softens, holds dust and eventually smells when the system comes up in October.

Two details that matter. First, they are only painted when the system is cold and stays cold, which in practice means scheduling radiator work outside the heating season or coordinating with you to keep that zone down. Second, the wall and the trim behind a radiator are part of the room, and getting to them is easier with the radiator painted at the same time than six months later.

Pipe runs, the register grilles in the floor of a house that later took forced air, and the boxed-in enclosures somebody built in the 1980s all come with the same job.

A hundred years of repainting leaves a measurable thickness on everything. In these houses it shows up as doors that bind, sash that will not run, window and door stops that have lost their profile, and a beaded edge on the stair skirt that has gone round.

Adding another coat to a door that already sticks makes the problem worse, so we deal with it instead. The latch edge and the hinge edge get taken back where the build is causing the bind, the stop gets cleaned out, and the door gets primed on the edges before the finish goes on. If a door has been adjusted by somebody shaving the wrong edge at some point, we say so before we make it our problem.

On millwork with a lot of build, there is a decision to make about how far to go. Taking a whole run of trim back to wood is a stripping job with its own cost and its own containment demands, and on most of these houses it is not the right answer. Knocking down the worst of it, filling honestly and recoating gets you a room that looks correct. We will tell you which category each run falls into rather than quoting the cheap version and discovering the truth on the second day.

Plenty of these houses have a short drive, a detached garage on a rear lane, or nothing at all beyond the curb. Everything comes in through the front door, over the hall floor, and up a stair with an original runner on it.

So we protect the route before we protect the room: hall and stair covered, newel and balusters wrapped, and the front door threshold padded. We plan material quantities up front rather than running back to the truck through the house all afternoon, and we keep the staging pile in one place you have agreed to rather than spreading across three rooms.

Start times are worth raising here too, because on these streets they are set locally rather than by us, and the answer is not the same in every part of 20815. We confirm what applies at your address before scheduling so that the first morning is not a conversation with a neighbor.

Most of these jobs happen with the family in residence, so sequencing is half of what we are selling.

We tell you which rooms are out of service on which days and Fredy checks that against reality every morning rather than setting it once. Bedrooms and baths get done so nobody loses their own bathroom overnight. The kitchen goes in a stretch you have agreed to in advance.

Art comes off the walls before we start, ideally by you, because in houses of this age the picture hooks are often in plaster that will not take a second hole in the same spot. We move the furniture and slide heavy pieces on pads. Low odor product lines from Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore, and cleanup at the end of every day rather than the end of the week.

Same four-person crew every day since 2002, background checked, so nobody has to be re-briefed on which rooms are off limits or where the dog is. No minimum job size. Call 703-869-0593.