A Pro Confides His Best Tips for Painting Exteriors

By: Brad Lernley, This Old House magazine (Page 1 of 4)

Photo: Pascal Blancon

"It's like a toothache," painter Andrew D'Amato says of the bland, peeling paint that confronts him when he comes home each day. "Every time I look at it, it really bothers me."

Poto: Pascal Blancon

Tom Thevenin, wielding a garden sprayer, douses the house's north side with trisodium phosphate, bleach and water to vanquish dirt and kill mold and mildew. D'Amato scrubs in the solution with a stiff-bristled long-handled brush.

Photo: Pascal Blancon

The Paint Shaver at work.

Photo: Pascal Blancon

Reading peeling paint as a pointer to moisture problems, D'Amato spots a leaking wooden gutter above the worst-looking shutter. He presses lead flashing into the gutter's seams, secures the metal by nailing on brass tacks and then seals the edges with roofing asphalt.

Photo: Pascal Blancon

For clapboards, D'Amato chooses an airless sprayer, which pumps paint fast (but also wastes much in overspray). For detail work such as lattice, he switches to a high-volume low-pressure sprayer. It ejects less paint but is more accurate.

Photo: Pascal Blancon

Although his painters sprayed most of the clapboards, D'Amato contends there's no substitute for brushwork near the trim. "You need that control," he says, underscoring his philosophy that, in the long run, the best way to paint a house is also the easiest: "If I just slapped some paint on, every other year I would be chasing it, touching it up. With the kind of job we can do, we get seven to 10 years out of a job."

Photo: Pascal Blancon

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"What's this?" grumbles Andrew D'Amato, squinting at a minuscule droplet of wet paint on a windowsill. He steps back for the wide-angle view.

"Man!" he mutters as he spies a half dozen more all-but-invisible paint beads clinging to the window's casing. Striding around to the side of the house, he buttonholes the offending employee.

"Front of the house, to the right of the door?drips!" he says tersely. The worker trots off toward the site, double-time, as D'Amato shakes his shaggy head.

Among the many chores that humans tend to botch or rush, repainting a house's exterior must rank near the top. The word slapdash, denoting all acts hurried and shoddy, could have sprung precisely from the near-universal tendency to slap pigment on a weary clapboard, then dash off to do something more thrilling.

While this tendency is regrettable, it's also understandable. The perfect metaphor for an endless, grueling task is a lone house-painter staring up at a three-story Victorian replete with mildewed shingles, peeling muntins and alligatored filigree. Exhausting labor, dizzying heights and the specter of lead poisoning?no wonder average mortals blanch.

But D'Amato, co-owner of Andrews Painting in Milton, Mass., actually enjoys painting, and he cares deeply about tiny drops on a huge house.

"Painting is the last step in the construction process and the most dramatic," he says. "The change we make is very satisfying."

Over the past 15 years, D'Amato, partner Andrew Lieberman and their crew have attended to dozens of grand old houses throughout greater Boston. "Our clients care about their home," D'Amato says. "It's more to them than a place to plunk. It's a showpiece. That's why they love us."

A graduate of the Art Institute of Boston, he took up house painting to repay school debts and discovered his affinity for it. Today's project is in Milton, at D'Amato's own house, which he and his wife began renovating three years ago. With an expansive front porch and gorgeous fretwork, the circa-1865 house has awesome potential waiting beneath a striated, peeling, moldy, graying skin. "I'm sure it hasn't been painted since the '50s," he says.

Which made him eager to get started. But the first requirement of any job is patience. D'Amato never paints an exterior before June.

"The long winters in New England saturate wood, especially exposed wood like this," he says. Atop a 24-foot ladder, he pulls a battery-operated moisture meter from a pocket and presses the meter's two prongs 1/4 inch into a clapboard high on the house's north side, typically the last spot to surrender its load of spring rain.

"We like the moisture content to be under 12 percent. Here it's 10, so we're OK."

Time to paint? Not so fast. The most important single lesson about top-notch house painting is that more than half the job is not painting.

"It's preparation," D'Amato says. "When we hire people, we tell them that prep is most of it. They say, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.' But as the days go by on the job, they say, 'I'm sick of this?I've got to paint something!'"

D'Amato is generally an affable guy, but he never bends on this point. "I tell them, 'I think you need another job.'"