Interior Painting in Herndon, VA

A house that has been lived in for a century has usually been papered more than once, and in these rooms we often find two or three layers with paint over the top of the last one.

Painted wallpaper is the difficult version. The film on top stops water reaching the paste, so it has to be perforated before steaming or it will not release. What comes off after that is uneven, and plaster underneath is frequently gouged where somebody has already tried with a scraper.

Our sequence is strip, wash the adhesive off completely, repair, skim, then seal with an oil or shellac based primer before color. Old paste bleeds through waterborne paint weeks later if it is not sealed, and by then the room is furnished again.

We will tell you at the estimate if a room is likely to need full skimming rather than spot repair. It is the single biggest variable in an old Herndon interior, and we would rather overestimate it than discover it on day two.

Out past the town line the houses are drywall and the ceilings are sprayed texture. Fox Mill Estates was built between 1972 and 1985, Kingstream and Herndon Chase are the same era, and in most of those houses the popcorn is still up there.

What decides the price of removing it is whether it has been painted. Unpainted texture wets through and scrapes off cleanly. Painted texture resists the water and turns a one-day ceiling into a two- or three-day one, plus more skimming afterward.

We sheet the room, wet the ceiling in sections, scrape, then skim, sand and prime before the finish. Handled wet and contained, not dry-scraped into the air.

The walls in these houses are almost always original builder flat. Forty-year-old flat is chalky, it will not wipe, and it does not take a touch-up invisibly. We wash, prime the repairs, and plan on full coverage instead of pretending a spot job will blend.

The subdivision houses came with hollow-core flush or six-panel doors and finger-jointed pine casing and base. Both paint fine, with two cautions.

• The glue lines in finger-jointed trim telegraph through a light color over time. Priming the whole piece rather than spot priming the fills keeps it even for longer.
• A hollow-core door hung for forty years is often out of square and rubbing the jamb. Painting a sticking door makes it stick more. We ease and adjust before we coat rather than after.

On the stained oak handrails and the stained trim packages in some of these houses, the decision is whether to paint or keep. Painted is cleaner and it is not reversible in any practical sense. We degloss, use a bonding primer and finish with a hard enamel, and we say plainly that stripping back to stain later is a much bigger job than painting it now.

Herndon Chase, Monroe Manor and the newer end of McNair Farms brought the open entry with a wall running up past the second-floor landing. It is a staging job, not a painting one.

We set a plank across the stairwell so the painter stands level with the surface, and we protect treads, the rail and the floor below. Working off a leaning ladder on a stair nosing is how you get a wavering cut line and a marked handrail.

Those houses often have a family room ceiling at the same height with can lights and a fan in it. Doing the ceiling, wall and trim in one setup beats building staging twice.

We are based at 8040 Trevor Place in Vienna, and Herndon sits at the western edge of what we cover. Lead times here can run a little longer than in Vienna or Tysons, and we tell you that at the estimate rather than letting you find out. Once we start, the crew stays until it is finished.

Interior work is not weather dependent the way exteriors are, so winter is a good time to book a Herndon interior. The one thing we do watch is temperature: a cold room slows curing badly, so we allow proper time between coats rather than stacking them.

Fredy Vargas founded the company in 2002 and comes out to look at the rooms himself. Four employees, the same crew each day. Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured. No job minimum. Ten percent off for veterans and anyone 65 or older. Call 703-869-0593.