Bob Vila wannabees, paint question

Factual Questions
1

I have an old house (built 1948 I think) that badly needs painting. It’s California Clapboard (that’s a wood frame house with nothing between the inside plaster walls and the outside wood but air).

On to the gist: :wink:

Paint is peeling badly. Some places down to the wood. Other places peeled spot shows another layer of paint. I’d like to paint it, but I feel it needs a good undercoat. Am I right? Some say just a couple of regular oil base coats slapped on should do it. I think I’d rather put on a good undercoat first. Need recommendations for what to use: some kind of primer, some kind of oil base paint, or possibly a flat (water based) paint. The area I live in is kinda dry (6-10 inches of rain a year). Another question is how to prepare the wood. I have a belt sander so I could use that, but I’ve heard sand/water blasting is better. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

2

As a longtime viewer of This Old House and someone who renovated his ranch house, how can I resist?

Regarding the paint that’s still on there, a lot depends on how much is flaking off, and how easy it will come off. I’ve seen pros on TOH using a big-ass paint scraper, taking care not to gouge the wood.

I used a water gun to get the paint off my (asbestos-siding) house. The previous owner hired two doofuses to slap a coat of paint on before the sale, and within a year it was coming off in great gobbits. It took most of a day for me to rent the machine, cart it home and blast the (one-story, 3BR house), but it all came off.

Using a power sander would take a lot of paper to use, and you’d better get a high-quality mask to keep the dust out of your lungs. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Since you’ve got bare wood, I’d recommend priming, then two coats at least. Priming helps bond the paint to the wood.

We used vinyl paint outdoors, mostly for the ease of cleaning. Indoors, I used water-based on the walls, but oil on the baseboards and corners, and that worked fine. Oil-based paint seemed to resist getting bashed at a lot more than water-based. Going against all advice, we used bright, bright, bright paint. Not a drop of flat paint. Not only brightened all the rooms up, but made cleaning off smudges much easier.

Since this is And as I’ve learned from my numerous jobs, it’ll look shitty right up until the end, when you put all the nice bits on. I only mention this because staring at the mess can be a huge letdown at times.

Now, let’s have the experts come in and correct my mistakes.

3

I enjoy exterior painting quite a bit. Yet, I don’t do it for a living. Ah, but that’s a topic for another thread. The last home I painted, I actually used a stain instead of an oil base or latex paint. You might want to consider it, or ask about it at the hardware store. The stains come in a variety of colors and cover very well. IMHO it protects better than any exterior paint will. The surface was 35-40 yrs old cedar siding, and the old peeling paint had to be taken off by high-pressure water hose and lots of scraping. The drawback to using a high pressure water blast is that it tends to rough up the wood surface a bit. Even still, you can make corrections to that. Actually, I’m not sure you can sand blast a wooden surface.

By the way, I saw an episode of “This Old House” where the painter cringed at the idea of using high pressured water to remove the old paint. He claimed the surface never completely dries, as the bare wood continues to soak up moisture before the paint goes on…however, the house I mentioned above still looks good at 8 yrs since the stain.

4

Horror story:

We tried to use a high-pressure power washer (rented) to remove the paint from our 1922 wood clapboard frame house, and succeeded only in gouging enormous actual holes in the wood, in the clapboards themselves. “Rough the surface up a little”? Um, yeah… :rolleyes:

I would not try to remove paint again with a high-pressure power washer.

And yes, we were “careful”… :smiley: