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Exterior Painting ProblemsBy Jim Sulski Summary: Painting your home's exterior is difficult because of several common problems. Prepairing to deal with these problems will make your painting project easier. When warmer weather arrives, many homeowners are planning to polish up the exteriors of their home with a fresh coat of paint.
>Exterior painting, however, can be a real headache if your home suffers (and most homes do) from a number of surface problems: peeling or cracking paint, mildew, efflorescence/mottling and even something called surfactant leaching. In fact, plan on spending more time ridding your home of exterior paint problems than you'll actually be spending on painting, say the experts. Preparation of the surface is critical to an exterior paint job, say the experts. Many people don't paint the outside of a home until they really need to do it and that usually means they'll be spending some time repairing the surface before they paint, add the experts. If you don't take care of the problems they'll come back to haunt you. What follows are some of the more common exterior paint problems and the best ways to solve them: •Peeling and cracking paint is one of the most typical exterior surface disorders. The problem starts as small hairline cracks. As they split open, more moisture gets under the paint and eventually most of the paint fails, falling off in big chips. Painting over a damaged existing paint that is breaking away from a house is a waste of time. The new paint will not stick, nor will the new paint job make the house look any better. Peeling and cracking paint occurs for a number of reasons. Moisture - say rainwater getting behind the wood from a leaky gutter - can also be a cause. So can cheap paint and so can diluting the paint. The paint might have also been applied when the weather was too cool, or wind made the paint dry too quickly. The only way to rectify this problem is to remove the loose paint. If the cracking does not go down to bare surface, remove it with a scraper or with a wire brush. Then sand or feather the edges of the cracks so the surface is smooth. Otherwise, scrape away the loose paint and sand to the bare wood. Next, you want to prime any bare spots before applying a top coat. •Blistering appears as bubbles of paint on the surface of a home as the paint loses its adhesion. It is often caused by painting a damp exterior, water coming in from behind the paint or painting a warm exterior in the sunlight. To fix blistering, it's important to determine if it was caused by moisture. If so, the source of the dampness - a leaky gutter or gap in the wall - must them be removed. Then, remove the blisters by scraping them away and sanding down to the bare wood. Next, reprime and repaint. •Alligatoring is the result of applying a hard coat of paint - such as an enamel - over a more pliable coat of paint or primer. It can also form when a second coat of paint is applied on a not-yet-dry undercoat. Alligatoring shows up as rough, leathery-like skin on the surface. It's not that noticeable from afar but is nonetheless unsightly. Alligatored paint needs to be treated like blistering or peeling paint - the existing paint should be removed by scraping or sanding the surface, or by using a chemical stripper. •Mildew is another exterior problem caused by moisture. A spotty black, brown and gray mold, mildew is mostly found on the north side of a house, which gets very little sunlight. Mildew is a living fungus and needs to be killed before it can be cleaned away. If you don't get rid of it, it's just going to show up again. Apply a mixture of one part bleach to three parts water to the mildew to kill it. Spray It on the surface of the exterior and let it sit for 20 minutes or so. Then scrub the surface down and rinse it. There are also commercial mildewcide-cleaners that can be applied with a garden sprayer. And when repainting, you can also consider a mildew-proof paint.
© by Jim Sulski. All rights reserved. March 8, 2005. NOTE: This column is distributed by Real Estate Matters Syndicate, PO Box 366, Glencoe, Illinois, 60022. This column may not be resold, reprinted, resyndicated or redistributed without written permission from the publisher. © 2005 by Ilyce R. Glink. Distributed by Real Estate Matters Syndicate. |
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