What is Required for a Good Exterior Paint Job?

Hopefully, you are reading this before you’ve hired a painter as some of the tips are important, if not vital, to know beforehand. This is because it is very difficult to see what has been done before any top coats were applied.To this end, I would highly recommend that you agree with the painter to allow you to inspect after certain milestones are reached. Such milestones might be:

• Completion of waterblasting
  Look carefully at the surface to ensure that it is clean. Check difficult to access areas such as soffits and fascias to be sure the painter wasn’t lazy.
• Completion of prep work: scraping, filling, caulking and sanding
  You need to be happy with the quality of the prep work before any paint goes on.
• Completion of undercoating
  This will allow you to confirm that everything was undercoated that should have been.
• After the first top coat on one side of the house
  This will give you an idea of the quality of the painter’s brushmanship BEFORE they paint the entire house. You don’t want to see a mess of brush strokes, drips and runs. A good painter uses a quality brush that minimises brush strokes, and employs techniques to “lay off” the paint so that the finish is even. Look lengthwise along weatherboards to see how well they performed this lay-off. You should not see any patchiness or unevenness in the sheen of the paint. Areas around soakers and undersides of weatherboards are common places for drips and runs.

This not only helps you, but helps the painter as well who will soon come to understand your quality expectations earlier rather than later. If the job is complete before you inspect, there is a lot more work to re-do should you find any problems.

In the contract, the painter will ideally have clearly laid out what they intend to do with each surface and the methods and paint systems they will use. If they haven’t arrived on the job yet, now would be a good time to check such things as:

1. Do they intend to waterblast first? Sanding alone will not remove dirt and may actually grind it into the surface. A thorough waterblast is nearly almost always required.
2. What are they going to do with flaking and bubbling paint? Paint bubbling or blistering is often indicative of paint that requires stripping. These issues occur more abundantly on sunny sides of the house, where the paint is breaking down and loosening its bonds from the substrate. This appears to be even more of an issue with native New Zealand timbers. If the contract has not specified stripping, then expect to find bubbles or blisters reappearing in the paintwork. A fresh coat of paint can activate blisters where there were none before.
   Flaking paint is similarly indicative of an aging paint job but doesn’t typically have the more serious consequences of a surface that is prone to blistering. There are two ways to go with peeling paint. The minimum requirement would be to simply scrape the paint off, give it a bit of a scuff with sandpaper, then immediately spot prime and top coat. However, this will result in a visible divot where the old paint once existed. A better way to deal with this is to fill the divot before spot-priming and painting. Note that flaking or peeling paint is often associated with moisture ingress, so once the area is scraped, the area should be well sealed and spot-primed with an oil-based primer.
3. Do they intend to undercoat before top-coating? And will they apply two top coats over the undercoat (three coats in total)? Undercoating is commonly done with window and door joinery but is not typically required for weatherboards, except over any bare wood areas.  If you ask a cowboy painter if he has applied two coats, he may say “yes!” when his idea of two coats might be one undercoat followed by one top coat. If the contract specifies using undercoat, then make sure this is followed by two top coats. Every surface should have a minimum two top coats regardless of what else was done.
4. With windows and doors, do they intend to paint the internal jambs, sides and undersides? With windows, particularly, often a painter contracted for your exterior will decide for himself what constitutes the “exterior” of the window. It needs to be decided mutually beforehand or you may have to agree with his own demarcations of exterior vs interior and end up with unpainted areas which you thought would be included.
5. Will they mask, or just manually cut in? Most painters know how to cut a straight line pretty well without masking, but in some circumstances, masking is better. Where the putty meets the glass on a window, there is a gap that should be well-sealed with paint. Masking give the painter the freedom to stuff paint into that gap without fear of getting paint on the glass. Without masking, the painter would need to tread too carefully around that area and the chances are that the gap would not be adequately sealed. If you really don’t want paint on your hinges, make sure the painter knows in advance.

Get as much of the above in writing, so that the painter cannot say that he doesn’t remember.

As you might have guessed by now, it would be rather difficult to check most of these things AFTER the paint job is completed. So, be prepared before you get your painter on site.