A friend is getting their home painted in preparation for sale. Their home was built in the early 1900’s and has seen many years of wear and many layers of paint over that time. Unfortunately the paint on the home right now is in pretty poor condition there are many areas where the paint is chipping and they expect to do a lot of work to get it looking good.
When completing a project like this you should consider the fact that the old paint probably has some amount of lead in it. Regulation on how to manage paint that has lead in it vary across the country and they are much stricter in locations like California. In reality California is a bit crazy and at the time of writing they are now forcing labels be placed on coffee saying it is a known carcinogen. Yes this might be the safe thing to do but where does it end. When in doubt check your local regulations before you begin.
To prepare the surface for new paint you will first want to pressure wash the home with a high pressure tip used specifically to remove paint. A normal fan tip on a electric pressure washer won’t do as well. This should remove a large amount of the lose paint but you need to be careful to not damage the wood while working.
After the house has dried you can then go over the surface with a paint scraper that has replaceable tips. You will need to scrape all surfaces and it will require replacing the tip quite often.
After scraping you should sand the entire home with a low speed disc sander. The head should be 6 to 7 inches with sandpaper in the 60 to 90 grit range. Again be careful to not damage the wood while working but you need to smooth down the edges of the remaining paint so that they blend and don’t have hard edges.
At this point you should know the quality of your surface and be able to make any repairs that are necessary. Nail down loose boards and fill any cracks.
A primer coat is next but you don’t want to use normal grade primer. A high build primer is required to level out the paint that remains. Some primers try transparent and you may want to ask about tinting with a color that will help your top coat build easier.
After the primer has cured you can then apply your top coat. Expect to use two or more coats of topcoat paint especially if you are changing colors or your primer wasn’t tinted.
Final Note
Many people think that they can skip all the other steps and just do a light scraping and then paint with top coat. This is a really good way to waste your materials and end up with a surface that looks like an amateur did the prep work.
Paint Prep is the hardest part of the job and it take many times longer than just applying topcoat paint. If you are doing the work yourself you need to take care to do the right things. If you are hiring someone to do the work for you make sure they prep and paint a small area before they complete the whole home so you will understand that saving $500 on sanding is going to result in a job you won’t like.