Avoid These Exterior Painting Mistakes
Yes, painting is a great way to customize your home exterior to match your personality. But as with everything in design, style trends dictate what is popular. However, style trends always change over time, some quicker than others.
As seen in many reality TV shows based on “flipping houses”, the exterior paint is what primarily attracts prospective home buyers to view the inside. Painting your home exterior can be a relatively low risk way to bring your home into a popular style. However, these 5 mistakes might ruin your home.
#1 Improper Paint Removal
Using a pressure washer on high pressure to remove paint that doesn’t easily scrape off will cause gauging and splintering to wood. Power scraping with a disc sander with a carbide blade instead of sandpaper will leave visible blade marks. Painting over bare wood will cause the paint to fail and crack leading to damaged wood. Using primer is imperative.
#2 Poor Prep Work
Without the proper prep work your exterior painting project is destined for disaster. Painting over damaged wood will prolong the rot and decay that could attract termites and carpenter ants and lead to expensive repairs. Overuse of epoxy filler rather than replacing wood that is structurally important will fail in time.
#3 Lack of Waterproofing
A quality painter will remove old caulking that has cracked and split over time and replace it with a fresh bead. On the other hand, poor quality painters cut corners and apply a thicker coat of paint to avoid the extra work. The result is paint that will quickly crack and water will enter and damage your wood.
#4 Cheap Paint
Many homeowners want to maintain their homes as frugally as possible. However, exterior paint has a very important role in the protection of your home. Choosing the cheapest paint will ensure that you will need to paint your home more often and end up costing you more in the long run. If you wait too long when your home needs to be repainted you will likely encounter expensive carpentry repairs as well.
#5 Painting Over Exterior Brick
Bricks are made from fire-baked clay that is porous and allows moisture to pass through them. Older bricks from the late 1800’s were soft packed as opposed to hard packed bricks in the early 1900’s. When you paint bricks you close the pores and stop the flow of moisture and that can lead to spalling or de-lamination. These damaged bricks will need to be replaced. Brick matching won’t be a problem since you will just be painting it anyway. However, brick will need to be constantly repainted once you make that decision. It’s a permanent decision that can’t ever be changed. If you have old brick, you will lose that authenticity forever.
