Painting Projects in Northern Virginia

Exterior work is the bulk of what we do from April to November, and it is where the difference between contractors shows up most clearly two or three years later.

The pictures in this section are mostly whole house repaints in Vienna, McLean, Falls Church and Great Falls: hardboard and vinyl siding, painted brick, stucco, cedar, and the trim work that goes with all of them. Look at the edges in these photographs rather than the walls. The line where the trim meets the siding, the cut around a window, the transition where a repaired board joins an original one. That is where you can tell whether the prep was done or whether somebody just rolled color over a dirty wall.

Several of these houses had rot when we arrived. Fascia gone soft behind a gutter, a window sill that had been caulked instead of replaced, a column base sitting in standing water. We cut those out and replaced them before painting, which is why some of the before shots look worse than the owner expected once we started opening things up.

Cabinet refinishing is the job with the widest gap between a good result and a bad one, and photographs are the only honest way to show which you are getting.

The cabinets in these pictures were taken apart. Doors and drawer fronts came off, hinges and handles came off, everything got cleaned of years of cooking grease, sanded, primed with a bonding primer and sprayed rather than brushed. That is why the finish in the photographs looks like furniture rather than like a painted wall.

Most of these were 1980s and 1990s oak in Vienna, Oakton, Reston and Burke, going to white, off white, or a deep color on an island. A few were thermofoil, which needs a different approach entirely. If your kitchen is on that list, the pictures here are a fair preview of what yours would look like.

Decks are the single most photographed job we do, because the before and after difference is so obvious that customers keep asking for the pictures.

Northern Virginia is hard on outdoor wood. Sun on the boards, water sitting in the grain, and a freeze and thaw cycle every winter that opens up whatever the summer dried out. The decks in this section were mostly grey and furry when we arrived. They were washed, brightened, sanded, had failing boards replaced, and then stained or sealed with something that penetrates rather than a thick film that peels.

There are a few Brazilian hardwood decks in this set, Ipe and Cumaru, which are dense and oily and will not take an ordinary deck stain. Those need a specific product and a specific prep, and there are photographs here of both the process and the result.

The last group is everything that does not fit neatly into the four categories above.

Power washing on its own: siding, driveways, walkways, patios, fences, and the green film that grows on every north facing wall in this region. The pictures show the halfway point on several of these, because a half washed wall is the clearest illustration of what was actually on there.

Siding repair and painting, including stucco patching and the synthetic stucco systems on some of the newer infill houses. Pool surrounds and pool house exteriors, which come up more often out toward Great Falls and McLean than people would guess. And a handful of odd jobs: a front door in a color the owner had been thinking about for two years, a garage floor, a set of shutters, an iron railing.

None of those are big jobs. All of them are the kind of thing we will come out and look at, because a small job done well is how most of our long running customers started.

Any contractor can put photographs on a website. Here is how to tell whether they mean anything.

Check whether the pictures look like they were taken in your area. The housing stock in Northern Virginia is specific: split levels, colonials, ramblers, brick Capes, and 1970s cedar. If a gallery is full of Californian stucco and palm trees, it is a stock library.

Look for photographs taken at an angle, in ordinary light, with real furniture in them. Perfectly lit, perfectly staged, perfectly empty rooms are almost always bought.

Look for before shots. Anybody can photograph a finished wall. A gallery that shows what the house looked like first is a gallery of jobs that actually happened.

And ask whether you can speak to the owner of a house in one of the pictures. We can usually arrange that, because most of the people in this gallery have used us more than once.