Prep Before Paint

"The most important part of any job is the prep."  I heard that numerous times from my father as I was growing up, and I have heard it countless times from Rick.  Prep is not always fun, but the proper prep makes the difference between a job that looks awful and will fail or a job that is done right the first time and looks great for years.  We certainly are in an extended prep stage now as we get Gladys ready for a new coat of exterior paint.

Our first task is the soffits.  When we purchased Gladys, the soffits had ripped open screens for attic ventilations.  Because the ripped screens provided access, fruit rats had moved into the attic, eating through the outer layer of our air conditioning ducts so they could live next to the moist and cool inner part of the ducts.  Lovely.  Since we wanted to keep boarders out of our attic, the first thing we had to do was to rip down the screens and to put up some aluminum vents.  We had done the job quickly and somewhat sloppily and have taken this long to finally getting back to them.  They need help.

The wooden soffits themselves are rippled with age, warping, and various coats of poorly scraped paint.  In order to smooth everything out, Rick is using an exterior spackling that gives us a smooth surface (after sanding, of course).  He worked on the south side soffit a little yesterday and finished the initial coat today.  Tomorrow we can sand it and then prime and paint it.

The pink area shows spackling that still needs to dry.

We also learned yesterday that the people who painted the house before us did absolutely no prep.  We are both amazed that the paint has stayed on the walls as long as it has.  When we began to scrape the walls, we found that the tan layer of paint came off in large patches.  A closer look at what was left showed a chalky white layer or the base grey of the stucco on our house.  Gladys is definitely showing her grey roots!

We took a paper-plate-sized piece of paint into the paint store just to get expert opinion.  The man in the paint store agreed that the paint had a chalky back and was showing signs of mildew between it and the house.  "It all has to come off," he said. "If you don't remove it all, it will just bubble up and come loose again in another couple of years, and you will have to repaint all over again."  I can guarantee you, that is not going to happen!

Rick worked with the pressure washer today, taking off some of the paint on the lower section of the wall while he let the soffits dry.  In some cases, the paint came off in sheets while in other sections, we will have to use a little more persuasion.

A pressure washer beats having to scrape off
all of the old paint.

Once we remove all of the paint, we will need to patch any holes and cracks.  We have holes in Gladys because each time a new telephone service came in (we counted three dead boxes when we bought her), or when any new cable service came in (at least two), the provider just ran the wires up the exterior walls, attaching it with wall anchors and screws.  We have since removed all of the unnecessary wires, but the anchor holes remain. Thankfully, we only have a few settlement cracks between the blocks that we have to patch, so the patching itself will not take too long.  Letting the patches dry, however, will take 24 hours of patience that Rick will have a hard time finding.

Some of the paint is off, but we have a lot more to remove tomorrow.

With the patches dry, we can the seal the entire wall with masonry sealer.  That will prevent water penetration, chalking, and further cracking of the stucco.  After the sealer dries, we can finally get around to adding two coats of paint to make Gladys beautiful again.

The job of painting her is going to take much more prep and time than we had originally thought, but in the end, the job will be done right.  That is what is important because I do not want to see Rick go through the effort or the expense of doing the same job again in a couple of years.

We thought that we were going to put a new "prom dress" on Gladys, as my friend Rose has said.  Now we know that we have to strip Gladys naked, add new underwear to seal her, add a primary coat of paint like a new petticoat, and then a final dress coat at the end.  Gladys is a demanding old girl, but in the end we intend to dress her right in something that she can proudly wear for years to come.