"Did you eat a lot of paint chips as a child?"

"(giggle) No, why?"

Alright, enough Tommy Boy references. Let's get down to business...

After a day of dry time, we got to work on the wood siding of the house again.

We had a friendly bet going about how much of the "alligatoring" paint the power washer would remove and how much additional hand-scraping would be required to get everything ready.

The East side of the house, post-power washing/pre-scraping.

The good news: I won the bet. Three-thousand PSI of water pressure isn't nearly enough to break away 40+ years of brittle oil-based paint.

The bad news: We need to scrape the entire exterior by hand.

One of the many trim boards being scraped with a 5-in-1 scraper.

It was easy to tell that the house was (at some point) painted with an oil-based paint and/or primer because the paint simply flakes off in bits and pieces. Had it been an acrylic-based paint, the chips would bend or flex before breaking. In some areas, the paint peels right down to the bare wood. In other spots, it still maintains a remarkably strong bond.

Exposure to the elements definitely makes a significant impact on certain areas of the house. The South (or back) side of the house receives the most sun throughout the days, and it shows. The only parts that didn't need too much attention were the areas directly under the soffit (roof line).


All of the trim around the windows and doors were in especially rough shape. I have a feeling this was due to a few factors:

1. the wood used on the trim had a smoother finish than the rough-cut siding, giving the paint less surface area to hold onto
2. these surfaces were not properly prepped/primed before the paint was applied
   

The side door after 30 minutes of sanding.

The East side of the house after scraping.

After spending most of the day Friday and Saturday scraping and sanding, our sore bodies begged us for a day off - and we complied. We did manage to remove the outer veranda doors from the front of the house that had been painted shut. Now we need to find a local refinisher to help us strip the paint off them so we can put a really nice finish coat on them before the end of the summer.

Exterior paint color reveal - COMING SOON...