Scraping, Priming, and Sanding Pillars

September 10, 2013 Justin

Today we started scraping and sanding the pillars on the Gerald house. Overall, they’re in pretty good shape, but we scraped down the bumpy seams and shaved off the bumps.

You can see how the old lead paint is cracked and peeling beneath the newer layers of paint, and a few areas needed to be gouged out and cleaned up. Once we did that, we primed it with Neverpeel Exterior Primer.

It looks pretty bad at this point, but generally, old wood like this looks worse before we fix it up and make it look good again. Later, I’ll post a few pictures of the same pillar after we’ve primed and applied elastomeric to it.

Benjamin Moore's Aura Exterior Paint, Exterior Painting, Restoration

Sampling Colors and Preparing the Garage

September 9, 2013 Justin

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.

Benjamin Moore's Aura Exterior Paint, Exterior Painting, Restoration

The Dollhouse Remodel

September 7, 2013 Justin

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.

Benjamin Moore's Aura Exterior Paint, Exterior Painting, Restoration

From One House to the Next

September 6, 2013 Justin

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).

Interior Painting

Painting Wood Paneling

September 3, 2013 Justin

We recently painted an apartment with wood paneling in the living room. In order for the paint to stick well in the long run, we primed it with Stix bonding primer from Turner’s Paint Store. Binding primers are designed to help the topcoat stick well over time. Stix is the best bonding primer we’ve used, especially since it’s acrylic (meaning it cleans up with soap and water).

Once the primer dried, we caulked the cracks and filled the holes. Once that dried, we painted it tan using Benjamin Moore’s Ultra Spec (which is a great choice for apartments like this one since it’s cheaper than Aura, but it still covers pretty well and is tough over time). This is our guy Josh, rolling on the paint, getting the job done.