If I Painted 2 Years Ago Paint Again Before Listing?

The paint on the house Dee rents went from bad to horrendous. When he moved in, there was a glaze of latex over several coats of oil, and it was kickoff to skin. He recommended stripping it down to bare forest, but the landlord didn't want to spend the money. So Dee scraped off all the loose pigment, spot-primed and repainted. Before long, the due south wall looked like a disaster zone.

Photo by Anna Palma

This Old House painter John Dee calls his neighbors Robert and Andrea Bowler "the image of diligent homeowners." They bought their postwar Colonial in May two years ago, and a month afterwards Andrea was downwardly at the local hardware store, picking out new beige pigment to lighten up the gloomy exterior. Soon Robert was up on the ladder, hard at work. "It wasn't easy," he says. "I scraped the whole house, rented a water gun, primed everything. I put two coats of paint over that. I did it when I got home from work, I did it on Saturdays. It took me the whole summertime. It looked and so expert." But within a year, as the Bowlers watched in horror, their labor-intensive paint job — and everything underneath — was flaking off in leathery sheets. The paint detached with such determination that some fries were embedded with cedar splinters from the underlying siding. Layers of pigment that had bonded to the house for decades came loose. "You lot can generally tell if you take a firm that is going to peel if you probe around a scrap," Dee says. "But my neighbors had no previous paint bug, and they went by the book." Dee has understandable sympathy for the Bowlers: Not long after his firm was repainted, it began peeling so desperately the due south wall looked like a head of hair after a botched perm. "It's a total blowout," he says. Most one in x pigment task goes amiss, says David Chupka, a technical manager for the Sherwin Williams Co. Ofttimes it's because of cutting corners — not sanding, not scrubbing, painting just before a storm,ignoring long-term wet penetration. But people who own old homes can practise everything they're told past paint salesmen and follow labels devotedly and however wind upward with paint that peels. If they've hired someone to do the work, at prices that can rival the toll of a new car, peeling pigment can begin to look like paper dollars floating off with each cakewalk.

William C. Feist thinks he knows why this happens and how to bargain with peeling paint. The problem can occur when an quondam house with multiple layers of oil-base of operations paint is coated with a mod water-base of operations paint, says Feist who headed the federal authorities's firm paint research plan for 20 years. "The homeowners decide to upgrade and put on a adept latex paint. But that final coat of a new type of paint can be sufficient to cause catastrophic failure, often right down to bare wood. " When people in the paint industry have a trouble they oftentimes consult with the chemical company that supplies them with the ingredients they put in their cans. In the United States, almost all pigment companies turn to Rohm & Haas and its Paint Quality Institute in Jump Business firm, Pennsylvania, nigh Philadelphia. In that location, in a six-acre field draped with two miles of odd-looking fences, 25,000 pigment samples are in a contest with time, weather and the sun. On a blustery twenty-four hour period last wintertime, the institute's technical managing director, Walter J. Gozdan, led the way through this maze, happy to talk most the intricacies of what people in the paint industry like to call coatings.

Essentially, he says, in that location are two kinds of business firm paint: oil (also chosen alkyd considering of the alcohols and acids used to make a synthetic oil) and then-chosen latex (which, it turns out, has no prophylactic in it). Both consist of iii principal components: a pigment, a folder that glues the pigment to a surface equally the paint dries and a solvent that makes the mixture loose plenty to brush on. Oil pigment forms a tough plastic moving-picture show equally the folder reacts with oxygen in the air. The binder can exist a natural oil, such equally linseed squeezed out of flaxseed, or oil modified with alkyds. Latex paint forms a flexible film every bit water evaporates and the once-floating spheres of binder and paint motion closer together and fuse. Latex paint was inverted at the end of World War II using synthetic safe equally the binder. Today the binder is nigh often a pure acrylic, a vinyl-acrylic or a vinyl acetate. The disquisitional difference between oil and latex paints is that they do non cure in the same way. Oil paint never stops curing. As information technology ages, it continues to oxidize, becoming more and more brittle. Latex cures in nigh ii weeks and stays pliable. Oil pigment generally adheres amend to problem surfaces because the oils are pocket-sized enough to seep into the wood or microscopic openings in sometime, even chalky paint. The resins in latex paint are by and large too big to seep into anything. But that can be advantageous. The gaps between the larger particles in latex paint let water vapor to laissez passer through. This makes latex less likely to peel from homes with excessive interior moisture.

Dee confers with pigment-company experts about the peeling paint.

Photograph by Anna Palma

New Paint and Sometime Houses

Equally Gozdan pauses nearly the centre of the paint maze, he points out how all this theory translates into reality. At a series of mock-ups of window frames coated with oil paint, he jabs a finger at stringy hairline cracks on some of the wood and deeper, squarish cracks on others. Both, he says, are testify that the oil paint has become too breakable to go on up with the expansion and contraction of the wood. So Gozdan walks to a nearby section where dozens of three-foot pine boards are painted with white latex from a variety of manufacturers. Some boards are gleaming, only afterward only iii years exterior, others are almost bare — a sign, he says, that manufacturers tired to cut corners past using inexpensive ingredients. No, Gozdan won't say which make is which. That's not the point anyhow. The lessons here are that latex outperforms oil and the expensive all-acrylic latex works better than less expensive latex with vinyl acrylics. "The most expensive pigment," Gozdan says, "is the cheapest in the long run." Rohm & Haas has a vested interest in this position: Paint gave information technology a postwar market for acrylics, which had been going by the ton into Plexiglas aeroplane windows. Still, one of the few independent paint research centers in the country, the U.S. government'due south Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, agrees. The lab compared oil and latex paints on its ain test fences strung beyond a windy hillside. "We have twenty-year-one-time latex that looks as proficient as if it were new," says chemist Mark T. Knaebe. The side of a typical firm, he says, should get more protection from two coats of latex over a primer coat than it would from ii coats of modern oil paint over a primer. No wonder paint salespeople tout the benefits of latex. Just what many don't realize is that all the tests that find latex to be superior have been washed past painting over bare wood clapboards or over wood that had only one or two coats of old pigment. No one has tested what works best over many layers of old pigment. Most houses built earlier 1950, every bit well every bit many newer ones, are covered with multiple layers of oil paint. When Gozdan is asked how this might affect the establish's recommendations, his reply is surprising: "I would never utilise latex over multiple coats of oil pigment. You lot stand a chance of peeling off all the paint if you switch." Latex paint can literally pull old oil paint off the house, he says. "I've seen houses where the paint has come off in 4-by-eight-pes sheets."

When a flexible layer of latex bonds on acme of brittle oil pigment the quondam pigment becomes a thin rope in a tug-of-state of war. As sunshine hits the wall, the wood and the latex tin can expand. Simply the oil paint in the middle is brittle. Now pulled with double strength, it either cracks or loosens its grip on the forest underneath. "The latex tends to advance the paint loss," says Carl Minchew, director of technical services for Benjamin Moore & Co. Gary Barrett, manager of technical services for the Painting & Decorating Contractors of America, says the stress on the one-time oil paint is greatest during the few weeks information technology takes latex to cure, although the results may take months or years to go fully evident. "It's the compress gene of latex," Barrett says. "It has to coagulate, or it can't cure." The force of this effect varies. Ofttimes houses with layers of quondam oil pigment can be successfully covered with modern latex. But when information technology doesn't work, the results may be disastrous. "Information technology's very unpredictable," says John G. Stauffer, director of the Pigment Quality Institute. To be safe, Gozdan and Stauffer say, people who accept houses with more than five layers of oil paint are best to stick with oil. Many others in the industry are not so cautious. Homeowners tin can safely recoat even many layers of oil pigment with latex equally long as the one-time paint is adhering well and is in skilful shape, says David Maurer, manager of product evolution and color commitment for the Gildden Co., which sold the first latex pigment in 1948. "If, categorically, latex going over oil was a problem, I don't recollect we'd have any latex paint, or we'd accept latex limited to new construction, and that's certainly not the instance, " he says. "But I will say that if you have a lost of loosely adhering — and it is common on older houses to see oil paints fractured right down to the surface — latex paints tin hasten the demise by putting pressure on the poor oil paint. I think oil paint makes a better Rough-and-tumble," Non long ago, a friend of Maurer'southward sought advice on how to repaint an onetime house with wood shakes. "It was the old oil syndrome," Maurer says. The paint was thick and groovy, and the options for dealing with peeling paint similar this were not good: Spend a lot of coin stripping off all the paint or spend less coin for a repainting that wouldn't last. "I told him the good reply was to remove it all, but the short-term answer was to put another layer of oil on top. At least he wouldn't be creating a new trouble. He'd simply be stalling the inevitable." To stall the inevitable as long every bit possible, homeowners tin do periodic touch-ups with oil paint instead of recoats. The National Park Service, custodian of many old houses, has found that homeowners accept more than fourth dimension to play with than they might recall. Oil paint is most probable to cleft, the service says, when information technology is more a sixteenth of an inch thick, the equivalent of 16 to 30 coats. Homeowners who stick with oil may find the pigment thicker and not as durable equally information technology in one case was. Many manufacturers have inverse their alkyd formulas to run across clean-air rules in effect in six states. But even if similar rules take effect nationwide adjacent twelvemonth, as expected, it still volition be possible — and legal — to buy oil paint the way it used to exist fabricated. Oddly plenty, manufacturers can continue to sell high-solvent paint only by relabeling information technology "quick-dry enamel," "industrial maintenance coating" or "marine paint." Manufacturers can also sell high-solvent oil paint by the quart, although buying it this way instead of by the gallon typically doubles the cost. And top-quality but expensive oil paint that meets most of the clean-air rules is available from several European manufacturers who, unlike their US counterparts, have continued to invest inquiry coin in oil formulas. One visitor, Fine Paints of Europe, sells a "problem house" oil paint formulated to permit water vapor to laissez passer through. Eventually, every business firm painted with oil will skin, says Minchew of Benjamin Moore, "because that's what oil paints do. They continue to oxidize and get brittle." Once a house reaches this point, he says, owners accept two choices for dealing with peeling paint: beginning they tin can scrape off all the peeling paint, prime the blank spots, and repaint with latex. Areas that weren't scraped bare will and then peel, and the owners can echo the procedure until eventually they accept a house entirely covered in latex paint that sticks. 2nd, they can choose a faster, less ugly method: Strip the business firm down to blank wood and start over, either with latex paint or a semi-transparent oil stain. (These stains don't form a moving picture, then at that place's zippo to skin.) Unfortunately, the best solution — stripping and staring over — is too the near expensive, In fact, it tin be so expensive that new siding may seem similar a amend option. The expense may even make the most faithful old-firm lover consider the unthinkable: vinyl siding. When Dee worked out the numbers for his business firm, he discovered it would cost only slightly more than to rip off all the old shingles, nail up new ones and repaint. Vinyl siding was even cheaper. "Peradventure that's the best solution," he says.

When a paint job costs $40,000-as it did on the 5,529-square-human foot Victorian in Concord, Massachusetts-y'all only pray it lasts. The walls and trim were scraped to blank wood, primed and coated with ii layers of oil paint imported from Europe.

Photo past Anna Palma

Half-dozen Signs of Paint Failure

When paint isn't the problem Former age doesn't always deserve the blame when paint cracks and peels. When moisture gets behind siding, it tin can literally push pigment off the front. Read the existing paint for clues:

• Bulges or flakes at the top of a wall bespeak to gutter or roof leaks; they should be found and stock-still.
• Paint peeling on a wall next to a bath means condensation on the back of siding is being fatigued through the wood when sunshine warms the wall. Install an exhaust fan vented to the outside.
• If window trim alone is peeling, pry off trim boards and plug gaps around the frame with a low-expansion foam sealant.
• If an entire wall is peeling, the siding may need better ventilation. One solution is to slip eighth-of-an-inch thick wedges under the lower edge of each board or shingle. One paint company sells plastic snap-off devices for this purpose. Do not caulk the bottom border of clapboards.

At the Pigment Quality Institute near Philadelphia, odd-looking fences test how paint performs on woods, aluminum and even faded vinyl siding.

A Perfect Paint Job

Bound is a great time to repaint, says Mark T. Knaebe, a chemist at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. "I similar it because you can be fairly sure you'll finish the task before it gets too cold." As co-author of "Finishes for Exterior Wood," a book summarizing the lab's 75 years of pigment research, Knaebe knows a quality job takes time. He recommends starting with a quick test to determine the extent of the work. Kickoff, cull an inconspicuous place where the paint is worst. Clean the surface, let it dry and pigment a small patch. The adjacent day, press on a Ring-Aid and then rapidly pull information technology off. If the tape is clean, it's safe to repaint later scrubbing the whole house. If the tape pulls off all the paint downward to blank wood, the house needs to be stripped before information technology's repainted. If but new pigment comes off, the old pigment is besides chalky and you'll have to glaze the whole house with an oil primer start. For houses with some flaking merely non plenty to require stripping, remove loose paint with a scraper and a power washer, taking appropriate precautions if you doubtable the old paint contains lead. Sand all blank woods and exposed paint edges or the new paint volition be thin there and will bit in no fourth dimension. Scrub the walls with water and impale any mildew by using a solution of one par household bleach to three parts water. Rinse and let the wood dry.

Most painters would simply prime number and then paint at this point, but Knaebe recommends coating blank spots with a water-repellent preservative specifically labeled equally compatible with paint. The repellent will limit shrinking and swelling of the siding due to wet. 3 sunny days later, yous can prime the bare spots or glaze the whole business firm. (If you've stripped all the pigment, latex primer is recommended.) Utilise the end glaze presently. Soap-like compounds can form on oil primers in equally little equally two weeks. If there is a longer delay, scrub and rinse earlier applying the peak coat. Two coats volition probably exist needed with latex, Knaebe says. Earlier painting, cheque the air temperature and the weather forecast and make certain they're compatible with the weather guidelines on the label. Weather condition that is too hot, too cold, also humid or too windy can undermine the best prep work.

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Source: https://www.thisoldhouse.com/siding/21015108/why-is-my-paint-peeling