Outside the house
Exterior Painting
Lap board, fascia, shutters and porch work, prepped properly so the colour is still holding next season.
Chapter 01
What do Georgia sun and rain do to a painted house?
A house in Houston County takes a beating from two directions. The south and west walls get hours of hard afternoon sun, which breaks down the binder in the paint until the surface turns powdery. Run a dry hand over it and your palm comes away coloured: that is chalking, and it means the paint is no longer protecting the boards underneath. The north side and anything under a heavy oak stays damp, and that is where green mildew settles in the grain.
Then there are the joints. Caulk where the trim meets the siding, around window casings and along the corner boards dries out, shrinks and splits, and every split is a small door for water to follow into the wood. Water behind paint pushes it off in sheets, usually starting at the bottom edge of the lap boards, at porch posts and at the base of the balustrade, which is where moisture sits longest.
Painting over any of that without dealing with it is the commonest reason an exterior job looks good for one season and then goes wrong. A soft spot in a board gets hidden for a few months and comes back as a bubble, and fresh paint laid over chalk or mildew simply peels away with it.
Ranch house repainted in pale slate blue lap board with black shutters and white trim
Scrape, caulk, prime, then two coats: how a house gets done
The surface comes first. Dirt, pollen and mildew come off with a scrub brush and a cleaner, then a rinse, and the boards are left to dry fully before anything goes on. Loose and flaking paint is scraped back to a sound edge and the rough ridge feathered smooth with a sanding block, so the old paint does not show as a line through the new. Bare wood gets a spot coat of exterior primer, and chalky surfaces get a bonding primer so the topcoat grips instead of floating on powder.
Next the joints are sealed with a paintable exterior caulk, pressed into the gap around casings, corner boards and trim runs, and smoothed with a wet finger. Windows, fixtures and anything that should not be coloured are masked, and the ground and shrubs are covered. Then two coats of an exterior acrylic latex: the first to build the film, the second for depth and an even sheen. Where siding is sprayed, each pass is back-rolled with a roller while it is wet, which pushes paint into the grain and into the bottom edge of every board.
Trim, fascia, shutters and porch work are brushed, not sprayed, because a brush leaves a controlled edge. That is how the slate lap board on a Bonaire ranch can sit beside black shutters and white trim with each line clean, and how a white Victorian cottage keeps the shadows between the balusters sharp. Ted and Cristina wrote that Earnest and his crew were kind and efficient and made their house look brand new, and that comes from the order of the work, not from a lucky colour.
Chapter 03
How can you tell the house is due again?
Do the hand test on the sunniest wall every spring. If colour comes off on your palm, the paint is chalking. Look along the trim for caulk lines that have pulled away from the wood, and check the bottom edge of the boards, the porch rail and the door thresholds for lifting or hairline cracks. Fading is a softer signal: a house whose south face has gone a shade paler than the north has lost some of its film.
Between paint jobs, the best thing you can do is rinse the walls with a garden hose and a soft brush once a year, and trim back shrubs and vines so they stop holding moisture against the wall. A small chip on a shutter or a porch step is worth a touch-up with a brush the same week you see it, before the weather works under the edge.
If you are in Bonaire or Warner Robins and the south wall is chalking, call Earnest at (478) 420-1979. He will walk the house with you and talk through the price before any work starts, the way Jarvis Dotson said he does.
“Earnest and his crew were very kind, super efficient, and truly made our house look brand new.” Ted and Cristina, Google review.