Exterior Townhouse Painting

For this townhouse, we completed the exterior house painting. As always we first pressure wash the house and waited for three days for the water to dry. For this townhouse, I decided to do the pressure wash all by myself, it was only a townhouse, it was not that difficult to do. On the second day, we remove all the rotten wood, caulk the house, remove a couple of downspouts, replace some wood frames, and more. The windows on the townhouse were made of vinyl, for the most part, we do not paint vinyl windows unless they are already painted or if the windows are stain with black stripes. Some of my clients that have new vinyl windows ask me to paint the windows, but I said, No, you need to wait until they are a stain, because the window’s factor to paint will always last longer than the paint I will be using. Sometimes black strikes are going down the windows, but the pressure wash takes care of that. There are some cases when after pressure washing the house the windows will still have the black strikes, then I tell my client to, yes, paint the windows. I want to also make something clear, even do we were going to paint the vinyl window we still cover the whole vinyl window with plastic. We cover the whole window with plastic because the paint was going to get on the windows screens, and glass when the sprayer guy sprayed the siding. We do not what our spray guy painting the window screens, once the paint gets on it, you can not take it off.

For this house, there was a large number of wood repairs. The window frames were 1 x 3 1/2 inches, most vinyl windows do not have this type of frame wood, is also one of the most expensive types of frames because we replace it with PVC, and is also thicker than most window frames. If you take a look at the picture I took, you will see that there is a small window for the attic, for that window, we replace all four sides of the window frames with PVC. If you take a look at the window in the middle, we replace the top, and left side window frame, of course, we replace it with PVC and the reason why we replace it was because they were rotten. For this townhouse, the client had already done some trim repair around the front door frames and the back door frames. The previous carpenter in my point of view did not know what he was doing, because he used cardboard frames. You should never use cardboard for the exterior of the house, the cardboard will last you a year the most if not less than that. When the problem is not that it gets rotten within a year, that is the least of your problems, the problem is that once rotten cardboard attracts terminates. I seen terminates eat 2×4, is horrible to see something like that, for this house, the client was lucky and there were no terminates. There was also other rotten wood around this exterior house painting project such as a rotten facial board, we replace it with a PVC facial board.

Now let’s move on to the painting part of this exterior house painting job. For this townhouse we use Sherwin Williams paint, we use flat for the siding and gloss for the trim. We always recommend using satin for the siding, but we were forced to paint the siding flat by the HOA. The difference, between satin, and flat is how shinning it is. We have noticed that the more shining the paint is the more the paint will last. But for this townhouse, the client was not given an option between satin or flat, if we would have painted the siding satin the HOA would have fine the client at least $250 per day. The HOA did allow the trim to be gloss, and that is what we always recommend, so that was great. This exterior house painting project did not take a very long time to finish, but the job was done right, and the client was very happy with the job we did.