Exterior House Painting in Vienna, McLean and Northern Virginia

Most exterior repaints in this area turn up rot somewhere. Bottom corners of window casings, the ends of fascia boards where two pieces meet, the trim behind a downspout that has been dripping for three years, the bottom course of siding where mulch is piled against it. We do the carpentry ourselves, so you do not have to find a second contractor and coordinate two schedules around one weather window.

We cut out the bad wood back to solid material and replace it in kind. On small isolated damage in a solid piece of trim we will use an epoxy consolidant and filler, which is a legitimate repair when the surrounding wood is sound. On a board that has gone soft through its thickness, filler is a cosmetic delay and we will say so and replace the board.

Anything new gets primed on all six sides before it goes up, including the cut ends and the back face. End grain drinks water like a straw, and an unprimed cut end is where the next round of rot starts. This is the kind of step nobody sees, which is exactly why it gets skipped.

While we are up there we will tell you what we see: a gutter pitched wrong, a downspout dumping against the foundation, flashing that has pulled away above a door. We do not upsell repairs we cannot do well, but you deserve to know what is feeding the damage.

Air temperature is what the app tells you. Surface temperature is what the paint feels. A south-facing wall in July in Vienna can be thirty degrees hotter than the air, and paint applied to a hot wall skins over before it can level or bond. You get lap marks, poor adhesion, and sometimes blisters where trapped solvent pushes the film off the surface.

So we start on the shade side and follow the shade around the house through the day. In practice that means an east elevation early, north through the middle of the day, west in the late afternoon. It looks like we are wandering. We are not.

The cold end has its own rules. Most exterior acrylics need surface temperatures above roughly fifty degrees, and they need to stay there for hours after application, not just at the moment the brush touches. An October afternoon in Oakton that reads sixty at three o'clock can be in the low forties by nine that night, and paint that has not formed its film by then may never harden correctly.

Dew is the quiet one. Late spring and early fall mornings here drop condensation onto siding well after sunrise. Painting onto a wall with invisible surface moisture causes adhesion problems and, on darker colors, surfactant leaching, which shows up as brown streaks running down a fresh wall after the first heavy dew. We wait for the wall, not the clock.

Rain is simple. We need dry surfaces going in and generally several hours of dry weather after. If a storm line is coming we stop early and stage the day around it rather than gambling on a wall.

The prep changes completely depending on what your house is wearing.

• Wood and cedar: the most prep and the best results. Watch for tannin bleed, which shows as amber stains coming through light colors, and needs a stain blocking primer, not another coat.
• Vinyl: it can be painted, but only in colors at or lighter than the original. A dark color on vinyl absorbs heat, and vinyl expands and warps. There are vinyl-safe formulations and we stay inside them.
• Stucco: we repair cracks first. Hairline cracking can take an elastomeric patch, larger structural cracking needs to be understood before it is covered. Stucco also holds moisture long after rain, so it dictates the schedule.
• Brick: painting brick is permanent for practical purposes, and it changes how the wall dries. We will talk you out of it if your brick is in good shape, and do it properly with a breathable masonry system if you are set on it.
• Composite and fiber cement: usually the easiest repaint. Clean, spot prime any cut edges and factory-finish failures, and coat.

When we look at a peeling house we are trying to figure out which of four things happened, because the repair is different for each.

Peeling down to bare wood in large sheets usually means moisture pushing from behind, not paint failing from the front. Bathroom or kitchen humidity with no vent path, a leak, or a wall that never dried out. Repainting without fixing the source buys you a season.

Peeling that leaves old paint underneath is adhesion between coats. Something was painted over a chalky, dirty or glossy surface without washing or sanding. This is the most common one we see, and it is entirely preventable with a proper wash and scuff.

Cracking and alligatoring, that dry lakebed pattern, is usually many coats of old oil paint that have gone brittle and can no longer move with the wood. Sanding and priming buys time; sometimes the honest answer is heavy scraping across a whole elevation.

Rust dots bleeding through are uncoated nail heads. They need spot priming with a rust blocking primer, and no amount of finish coat will hide them otherwise.

One more thing worth knowing: caulk does not belong everywhere. Vertical joints and trim-to-siding joints get sealed. The bottom horizontal edge of lap siding should stay open so any water that gets behind the board can drain and the wall can breathe. Sealing that edge traps water in the wall, and we have opened up plenty of rot that started with a well-meant bead of caulk.

Two finish coats is standard on wood and stucco. On a repaint in the same color family over a sound, well-adhered existing finish, one coat over full prep can be genuinely adequate, and we will tell you when that is true instead of selling you a coat you do not need. Going lighter over a dark body color, or coating a house that has been bare for a while, is a two coat job and sometimes needs a tinted primer first.

Sheen outside behaves differently than inside. Flat hides siding imperfections and is the traditional look on older wood bodies, but it holds dirt and cannot be washed hard. Satin is where most of our body coats land now: it sheds water and pollen and cleans up. Trim, doors, shutters and railings go satin or semi-gloss, which handles hands, rain and sun better and gives the house its edges.

Realistic life expectancy in Northern Virginia depends almost entirely on exposure. A shaded north wall can look good for a long time while the south and west elevations chalk and fade first, because ultraviolet exposure is what breaks down the resin. Deep reds and blues fade sooner than earth tones for the same reason. It is normal, and it is also why touching up one elevation years later never quite matches.

Color behaves differently outdoors. A chip that looks right under kitchen lights will read two shades lighter and more saturated on a sunlit wall, because there is roughly a hundred times more light hitting it and it is bouncing off the lawn, the driveway and the sky. People are surprised by this every time.

So we put real samples on the actual house, in two spots, and we look at them at three different times of day before anyone commits. A north wall and a south wall on the same house will not read the same, and that is not a paint problem.

The other practical note is that your body color has to sit next to things you are not painting: a roof with brown or gray undertones, brick, stone, a copper gutter, the neighbors' houses on either side. Roof color is the constraint most people forget, and it is the one thing on the house nobody is changing. We will bring options and we will give you an opinion when you ask for one.

We work Monday through Friday, 8 to 5, weekends by appointment. The same crew comes each day at the same time. Fred checks in with you every day, not just at the start and the end, so if a color reads differently on the wall than it did on the chip, we know on day one.

Before we start we cover shrubs, walkways and driveways, move grills and furniture off the deck, and take down what needs to come down. Windows and doors get masked. We ask you to keep pets in during working hours and to let us know which windows you need to open. At the end of each day the site gets cleaned, ladders get laid down or secured, and nothing is left where a kid can climb it.

We do the walkthrough with you at the end, in daylight, standing back and then up close. We would rather you point at something now than live with it.

Call 703-869-0593 for a look at your house. Our exterior crews cover Vienna, Oakton, McLean, Great Falls, Arlington, Falls Church, Tysons, Fairfax, Burke, Reston, Herndon, Annandale, Alexandria and Springfield.