Peeling Paint on Gables

On this exterior painting project, a quick look at the front gables does not reveal anything out of the ordinary: just peeling paint; another day in the life of a house painter, right? Not so fast. Look closer. Behind the paint that already peeled, there is the original coating. What is going on here? Is there an adhesion problem?

The top coating seems to be delaminating from the original coating. Why? How extensive is this problem? Is there an adhesion problem here? Those are questions Chicago’s Painting in Partnership needed to answer in order to give its client the best possible paint job.

In order to ascertain the answers to these questions, we did some testing. We applied strips of masking tape over what looked like a perfectly sound, painted surfaces and then yanked them off. Oh my! All the paint comes off! Behind the top layer of the paint was a mildew infestation. This is why the top layer of the paint was failing!

Sound-Looking Painted Surface

Mildew Infestation Underneath the Last Coating

How could this have happened in the first place? The house being fifteen years old, we speculate that the original trim was factory stained and then installed on the house. The house probably sat for months with that factory finish, while the house was being finished on the inside. Before tuning it over to its buyer, we think the house was given a quick coat of paint to “dress things up”, without the proper cleaning of the surfaces and killing the mildew spores. The new coating created darkness and allowed mildew to multiply between the two coatings and eventually cause the paint failure.

To properly execute this exterior house painting project, we had to remove the old paint wherever our tests revealed the mold problem. We used scrapers to remove the failed coating. After the removal process, we killed the mildew and power-washed the surfaces. We then had another round of scraping to remove any paint loosened by the power washing. Finally, we primed all bare wood with an oil primer.

This project exemplifies the care Painting in Partnership invests in every project to ensure the long-term satisfaction of our clients with all the house painting work we do.

Dealing with Rusty Nails Before Exterior Painting

We are currently doing paint restoration on a 1882 farm house. There are a total of 3,600 rusty nails on the siding of this house. As a first step in the preparation work for this exterior painting project, we had to set up a procedure for effectively dealing with the rusty nail situation.

As a first step, our house painters used a nail punch slightly smaller than the nail heads to sink the nails by no more than 1/8”. We then scraped the loose paint off the face of the nails and applied a rust converter to kill off any rust residue. Our painters then filled the nail holes using a waterborne window putty. We chose this product because of its rust-inhibitive qualities and also because it requires no sanding and no priming, and has a quick curing time. Because this product shrinks, we had to hit the nail holes two or three times to eliminate any cratering of the product.

Our client greatly values his piece of Northern Illinois country history and he wanted to make sure his rusty nail issue was permanently dealt with before we undertook the exterior painting of his old farm house.

What makes it an unlikely scenario is that, in a climate this cold and dry, wood does not rot. Therefore, there is no need to use exterior painting as a means to preserve wooden structures, which is a nightmare scenario if you are a house painting contractor in the area. Consequently, without the colors that paint would have added to the décor of the town, the predominant colors, for most of the year, were black, white and every shade of gray.

Another critical factor was the wildly varying amount of light through the year, from total darkness for 3 months to twenty four hours of sun in the few summer months. The rest of the time, there are blue shadows and a sky that changes from pink, to turquoise to lilac.

Most of the town’s buildings are owned by a coal mining company. In 1981, in a bold and visionary move, the Board of Directors of the coal company hired Grete Smedal, a renowned environmental designer and color expert, to develop a color scheme for both housing and public buildings in the town. Having understood the power of color to enrich one’s environment, the Board presented Ms. Smedal with the challenge and the opportunity of a lifetime.

In 2004, I had the great pleasure and privilege to meet Grete in Trumso, Norway, at an international conference of painting contractors. After the conference , she sent me a copy of the book she had written on this unique color design and painting project.

After much study and deliberation, Grete finally settled on a color palette of almost equal whiteness, blackness and chromatic intensity. All the colors were of medium lightness, which allowed the color scheme to offer sufficient contrast in any season.

The actual exterior painting was executed in the 80s and 90s, which brought a smile to the local painting contractors. Ms. Smedal gave the school building a special color treatment. She had a row of 50+ windows painted in the colors of the rainbow. In her book, published in 2001, entitled “Longyearbyen in colors – status and challenges”, she quoted an anonymous miner who wrote the following:

“A span of the rainbow over summer wet meadow,
Is it a dream of a time you have left?
Much is forgotten, but may be not this:
The hunt in the woods for the rainbow’s end.

Just before the darkness of fall shadows the sun
You see a vision and then you see that
The end of the rainbow has hit on the school.
The treasure of Knowledge is the happiness you sought.”

Picture of Longyearbyen's School

Here is a picture of the school in the Fall:

Thanks Grete Smedal for your magical work in the North pole!

Color and painting have the power to add great value to people’s life. This is the belief that inspires everything we do at Painting in Partnership, Inc., painting contractors in the Chicago area.