Painters in Falls Church, VA

We do our own carpentry. Rotten trim gets cut out and replaced with new stock, primed on all six sides, then painted. It does not get filled with caulk and hidden. That one habit is the reason our exteriors on these older Falls Church houses still look right five and ten years on, and it is why a fair number of our clients here have hired us three and four times over the years.

One more point about the older stock. Almost everything in the established parts of Falls Church predates 1978, so old exterior coatings deserve care. We do not dry-sand or power-grind aged paint. We wash it, scrape wet, keep the debris contained and cleaned up, and prime bare wood the same day it is exposed.

Falls Church has a lot of brick. Brick Capes, brick ramblers, brick colonials, and over the last fifteen years a great many of them have been painted white, off-white or a soft gray. Done properly it holds up for years. Done in a hurry it fails, and it fails badly.

The failure is nearly always the same story. Someone rolls a standard exterior acrylic straight onto unwashed brick and soft old mortar. Moisture that used to pass out through the brick face now has nowhere to go. Two or three winters later the paint lifts in sheets, low on the wall where the ground splashes it and in a stripe behind each downspout.

We wash the masonry, let it dry properly, repoint anything loose, and use a masonry primer with a breathable topcoat from Sherwin-Williams or Benjamin Moore. On chimneys and foundation walls we look for efflorescence, that white salty bloom, and sort out the water causing it before anything goes on the wall. If your brick was painted a few years ago by somebody else and it is peeling now, we strip it and start again. That is an ordinary week for us.

You have watched it happen on your own street. A 1954 rambler comes down and a six-bedroom house goes up on the same lot. It has been going on for years inside the city and along the edges of Idylwood and Pimmit Hills.

Those houses look finished. Often the paint is not. Builder spray work is usually one thin coat of flat over unsanded drywall, primer only in the closets and garage, and trim sprayed before the flooring went down. Six months in, the walls will not wipe clean, the corners are burnished from touch-ups, and every door shows roller texture.

We get called into two- and three-year-old houses here to repaint the interiors properly. Sand, prime the patching, two full coats, and trim brushed and rolled so it lays flat. It is not exciting work. It is the difference between a wall you can clean and a wall you cannot.

The outsides of those infill houses need watching too. Many of them carry stucco or a synthetic stucco system on the front elevation, sometimes with stone at the base and fiber cement round the sides. Those details fail at the joints: around window heads, at the base of columns, where the stucco meets a roof line. Water gets in behind and you do not see it until something stains. We repair stucco as well as paint it, and on a five-year-old house that is usually a small job that stops a large one.

The lots are another factor. Infill houses in Falls Church sit close to the property line with big footprints on small parcels, so there is often only a few feet between the new wall and the neighbor's fence or a mature oak. Access has to be planned. We would rather work that out at the estimate than turn up with equipment that will not fit down the side.

Plaster, popcorn ceilings and small rooms. That is the interior of most pre-1965 Falls Church houses.

Plaster and skim coats

Real plaster over lath moves with the seasons. It cracks at the upper corners of doors and windows and along ceiling seams. Filling those with lightweight compound and painting over the top does not hold. We open the crack, tape it where it needs taping, and skim wide enough that the repair does not telegraph under a low sheen.

Popcorn ceilings

We remove them and finish the ceiling smooth. It is messy work and we sheet everything in plastic first, but it changes a 1958 living room more than any wall color will.

Trim and doors

Plenty of these houses still carry original varnished trim and hollow-core doors. Painting over old varnish without a proper bonding primer is how you get trim you can scratch off with a fingernail. We degloss, prime for adhesion, and finish with a hard enamel that survives a family.

Crown molding, chair rail, wallpaper removal and drywall repair all come from us as part of the same job, rather than you chasing a second trade.

Falls Church kitchens are usually one of three things. Original 1950s wood cabinets with slab or simple shaker doors. A 1990s honey oak remodel. Or something around ten years old that is perfectly sound and just the wrong color now.

All three refinish well. Doors and drawer fronts come off and get labelled, then degreased, sanded and sprayed with a cabinet-grade finish. The boxes get done in place with the room masked. You keep your layout, your drawers and your kitchen.

Old oak needs one extra step, because the open grain will read through a light color unless it is filled and primed for it. At the estimate we will tell you straight whether your doors are worth refinishing or whether you would do better replacing the doors and having us finish the new ones.

This town has real tree canopy. Between the mature oaks through Broadmont, the woods around Cherry Hill Park, and the shaded corridor along the W&OD Trail, a lot of Falls Church decks barely see direct sun.

Shaded decks stay damp. Algae grows on them, the boards go gray and slick, and any thick film finish peels off in patches. We wash, brighten the wood, and use a penetrating stain that wears away instead of flaking. On a north-facing deck we will usually recommend a solid or semi-solid stain and an honest recoat cycle rather than pretending a five-year product lasts five years under a tree.

If your deck is Ipe or Cumaru, say so when you call. Brazilian hardwood is dense and oily and it rejects ordinary deck stain. We do a lot of it and we know which oils actually take on it.

Fredy Vargas started this company in 2002. Twenty-four years on, he is still the one who comes to look at your house, and he checks the work himself every day a job is running. Four employees, same faces from the first morning to the last.

Licensed in Virginia, number 2705098145. Bonded and insured. Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore. No minimum job. One bathroom ceiling is real work to us, and several of our long-running Falls Church clients started with something exactly that small. There is ten percent off for veterans and for anyone aged 65 or over.

Call 703-869-0593. Our hours are 8 to 5 Monday through Friday, and we will come out at a weekend by arrangement if that is the only time you are home. We are based on Trevor Place in Vienna, about fifteen minutes up Route 7.