House Painters in Herndon, Virginia

If your house or shopfront falls inside the historic district, the Historic District Review Board has a say in the outside. Most exterior changes need a Certificate of Appropriateness before work starts. The town publishes two documents that set expectations, the Herndon Historic District Guidelines and the Downtown Herndon Pattern Book, and staff at 777 Lynn Street will confirm whether your property is in the boundary and what your project needs.

We are painters, not your representative in front of the board. We will not file paperwork for you and we will never promise you an approval. What we will do is paint to whatever gets approved, and tell you straight what we think will actually hold up on a century-old wood facade.

A few things we have learned working on old houses in town:

• Repainting close to the existing color is the smoothest path. A noticeable change on a street-facing elevation is the part that draws review attention.
• Original wood siding and trim wants hand scraping and spot priming. Aggressive machine sanding eats the profile off a bead or a bracket and you cannot put it back.
• Glazing putty on old wood sash fails long before the paint does. We reglaze rather than paint over a cracked, shrunken bed and call it done.
• Porch floors and steps hold standing water and get walked on. We treat them as their own piece of work, not as a rushed afternoon at the end of the siding.
• If your brick was never painted, we will usually tell you to leave it unpainted. That happens to line up with the preservation view, and it is also better for the masonry.

Fox Mill Estates is a fair picture of what most Herndon exterior work actually looks like. It is 1,120 single-family houses built between 1972 and 1985 on quarter-acre to half-acre lots, bordered by Lawyers Road, Reston Parkway, West Ox Road, Fox Mill Road and the Fairfax County Parkway, with a homes association looking after 57 acres of common land. Trees that were saplings when those houses were framed now hang over the roofs.

Kingstream, off Dranesville Road, is detached houses with sidewalks and green yards. Herndon Chase, near Herndon High School, runs to larger houses with garages and deep lots. Monroe Manor is mostly 1990s. Great Falls Chase combines 106 single-family homes with 336 townhouses around a shared recreation area. McNair Farms, on the Fairfax County side of 20171, is a planned mix of detached homes, townhouses and condominiums.

Three practical points on houses like these:

• Read your covenants before you settle on a color. Several of these communities run an architectural committee, and townhouse rows frequently have a fixed palette. One phone call now saves a repaint later.
• Vinyl siding and aluminum-wrapped trim can be painted, but they need a bonding primer and a coating rated for flexible substrates. We use Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore products made for that. Vinyl also has a heat limit: go much darker than the original and the panels can warp.
• Garage door frames, window sills and the bottom edge of trim boards fail first. On a 1980s house those are usually finger-jointed pine, and the joints open. That is carpentry, not a bead of caulk.

Herndon sits on rolling ground with heavy tree canopy. The W&OD Trail runs straight through the middle of town, Runnymede Park holds woods and wetland along Sugarland Run, and the older streets north of Elden are shaded most of the day.

Shade is good for paint life and bad for paint cleanliness. North and northeast walls under trees grow mildew and a green algae film. Paint over that and you have bought a two-year finish instead of a long one. We power wash first, and where mildew has set into the surface we treat it rather than just blasting at it with pressure.

South and west walls have the opposite problem. Full afternoon sun on a west elevation is what fades a color and what pulls caulk joints apart. On most Herndon houses the west side and the south gable need more attention than the other two elevations put together, and we plan the working day around not laying paint on a wall in direct heat.

Our exterior season here runs roughly April into November. In the shoulder months we watch the overnight low, not just the daytime high. A coat that goes on at 60 degrees and drops to 42 by midnight does not cure the way the can says it will.

Most decks in the Herndon subdivisions are pressure-treated pine from the 1980s and 1990s. Those get washed, brightened and stained or sealed, and we will be honest that a horizontal wood surface in Virginia sun is a maintenance item rather than a one-time fix.

The decks people call us about specifically are Brazilian hardwood, mainly Ipe and Cumaru. These are dense, oily boards and they do not behave like pine. Film-forming finishes peel off them in sheets. Ordinary deck stain sits on top and flakes within a season. They need cleaning, sanding where the grain has lifted, and a penetrating hardwood oil put on thin and wiped back. Fred has done a lot of them and it is one of the few things we would call a specialism.

While we are down there we look at railings, stair stringers and the ledger board. If a deck has structural rot, we tell you before we finish it rather than after.

1970s and early 1980s

Popcorn ceilings, hollow-core doors, and a lot of flat builder paint on walls that have never been properly washed. We scrape and skim popcorn ceilings and we contain the mess while we do it. Walls in these houses want a real wash and a primer over any repair, not two coats laid straight onto forty-year-old flat.

Late 1980s through the 2000s

Two-story foyers and family rooms with eighteen-foot walls. Those need staging or proper ladder work and a cut line that stays straight at height. The builder off-white in a lot of these houses is still the original 1995 coat: chalky, and impossible to touch up invisibly. We plan on full coverage rather than spot work and say so in the estimate.

Older houses in town

Plaster walls, deep window trim, and often a layer or three of wallpaper. We strip paper properly, seal the wall, skim where the paper pulled the plaster face off, then paint. It takes longer. The finish is worth it.

We also do crown molding, chair rail, and trim-and-door repaints on their own where the woodwork is tired but the walls are fine.

Plenty of Herndon kitchens still have the original honey oak from the late eighties or the nineties. Refinishing costs a fraction of replacement and takes days rather than weeks, and you keep the boxes you already paid for.

Our sequence is degrease, sand, bonding primer, then two finish coats of a cabinet-grade enamel. Doors and drawer fronts come off, get labeled and get sprayed lying flat so there are no runs on the face. Boxes and face frames get done in place. Oak grain will still read through the finish unless you want it grain-filled first, and we say that at the estimate so nobody is surprised on the last day.

Twenty-four years on from opening the doors in 2002, Fredy Vargas still turns up on site himself and looks in on every job daily. The crew is four people, and it is the same crew at your house each day rather than whoever happened to be free that morning.

We are based at 8040 Trevor Place in Vienna. Herndon is toward the outer edge of our service area, so lead times out there can run a little longer than they do in Vienna or Tysons. We would rather tell you that up front than string you along. Once we start, we stay until it is finished.

Virginia contractor license 2705098145. Licensed, bonded and insured. Office hours are Monday through Friday, 8 to 5, with weekends by appointment. Anyone aged 65 or over, and any veteran, takes 10 percent off the price. There is no minimum job size, so a single bedroom or one rotted window sill is a perfectly normal call for us.

On Google we hold a 5.0 from 40 reviews. Thumbtack shows 93 five-star reviews against 150 hires, with Top Pro status awarded each year from 2021 to 2025. A number of the clients we work for now first hired us more than fourteen years ago.