We’re almost done with this big craftsman house near the university.
Category Archives: Benjamin Moore’s Aura Exterior Paint
Mission Paint’s New Store Location
We love using Benjamin Moore paint (and have been for 18 years), so when Bryant, the owner of Mission Paint, told us he was looking for a new store, we were pretty excited. We’re in and out of the store all the time, and its location is really important to us (we like having it in the middle of town).
The new location is at 1132 Longstaff, next to Boyce Lumber, the Missoula Fencing Academy, and the Spirit Halloween store. It’s central to most of our jobs, and is closer to the University and the Rattlesnake, both neighborhoods we work in often.
It’s a different setup than the old store location, but we like it.
Beautiful Painting Weather
It’s a perfect autumn day to be painting outside. After 18 years of painting in Missoula, we’re used to fall’s abrupt arrival. We get cold mornings and pleasant afternoons. Soon enough we’ll transition to interior painting.
Cedar Siding in the Rattlesnake
We recently finished prepping and painting this house in the Rattlesnake. It’s got a combination of vertical cedar shakes and lap siding.
Brushing and Rolling
Sometimes we spray, and sometimes we brush and roll. We’re brushing and rolling this Masonite-sided house since we’re not changing the colors (and because Masonite is easy to brush and roll and takes paint really well).
Caulking the Blue House
We just finished caulking our first exterior job of 2014, and are going to start painting it today.
We applied a coat of Benjamin Moore’s Aura to the house last fall before the builder replaced the windows, fascias, and soffitts over the winter (the homeowner wanted the house to be blue through Missoula’s dreary winter). So now we only need to apply a solid second coat and the house will be finished.
Sampling Colors and Preparing the Garage
Today we made good progress on the big house on Gerald. We scraped, primed, caulked, and applied elastomeric to the garage.
We also applied sample colors to the back porch to see which colors would work best to spruce up the detailed areas.
The Dollhouse Remodel
We’re working on this old house in Missoula’s Rattlesnake.
The white splotches are elastomeric patching compound, and even though you can’t tell, we primed all the shingles with Neverpeel clear wood primer to toughen up all the old shingles as well as to seal the new ones (this is a remodel project where they’ve added new windows and expanded the building, which required new shingles to be mixed with the old).
And as usual, we’re using Benjamin Moore’s Aura Exterior Paint on this house, both inside and out.
From One House to the Next
This week we painted 2 houses and started a third one. Well, we prepped the first one one day last week and painted it on Tuesday.
We started with this one, which just needed some basic preparation (scraping, caulking, and some elastomeric) before painting:
After we finished that one, we prepped and painted this one (which is only 6 years old):
It has Hardiplank siding (which is concrete fiberboard), and it was in good shape except a lot of the caulking had cracked and needed to be re-caulked, and the drip cap over the belly band was obviously in terrible shape (water falls onto it when it rains, and the original paint and factory primer weren’t very good). Luckily, we know how to fix it–in this picture, we had already scraped and primed it with Neverpeel clear primer, which toughened it up a lot and prepared it for elastomeric, which you can see in the next picture (it’s the white stuff on the pillars). Unfortunately, I was so focused on getting work done that I didn’t take any wide-angle before shots.
The customer also wanted to go with a more pronounced blue and darker accents on the corbels (the supports along the gable).
Here are a couple shots of the dripcap and how it looks after we prepped and painted it, although we were still going around sharpening edges when I took these pictures:
Once we finished that house, we started scraping and priming this extremely nice house in the university neighborhood:
We’re going to change the colors and really transform it onto something interesting.
In the next shot, you can see our guy Clay–while he looks pretty crazy, he’s extremely dedicated and helps make these houses look great.
Between the house and garage, it has 56 windows. Yes, 56 windows. And we’re going to paint all of them black with green trim, which I think will look great. I’ll try to post some pictures of the process (scraping, priming, caulking, and window glazing as necessary).
Fixing LP Siding
We recently painted this house with deteriorating LP siding.
The white spots are elastomeric patching compound, which we always use to fix up exterior wood products (and stucco). The next picture isn’t great, but this side of the house was completely wrecked. We scraped the undersides of every board, primed all of it, sealed it with elastomeric, then painted it. It’s labor intensive, but it works well.
I really need to start taking the time to get good before and after shots, but we’re so busy I’m always trying to get work done and forget. I’ll post some better shots of this house soon so you can see how good it looks.