Exterior House Paint Prep recommendations?

the city has given me until May 2 to paint the sections of the house where the paint has peeled and exposed wood. I have friends with experience coming to visit in March and help me, weather permitting. I need to find the most time/cost effective means of prepping the areas before then. I'd prefer to not scrape. A friend suggested an electric angle grinder with various sanding disks, Scotchbrite, wire wheels, etc. Any other suggestions on good value brands of angle grinders and disks for this application?

I've been very happy with my harbor freight angle grinders. They were $10 on sale. Sanding a whole house may burn one or two out, but still cheap. They are noisy though.

I'm painting mine soon and I won't be scraping or sanding. A stiff brush and TSP wash solution should take all the chalking off and I don't have peeling.

Pressure washer?

i pressure wash houses before i spray them(several days of course). it blows off all the loose bits and leaves the rest clean and ready for paint. spot prime the bare wood before painting.

shotgun

+1 on the pressure washer. It will work well and do it 10 times faster than sanding.

Power washer FTW. Also, if you don't have one you can buy/rent a tip that spins around. These remove paint much more effectively than regular tips. Be careful not to gouge the wood as you go. Give it a week between washing and painting. A quick light sanding to get rid of the "fuzzies". Prime any bare batches and paint with a high quality latex paint.

Good luck

Buy the best damn paint you can find. The cost of the paint is nothing compared to the time you'll put into the prep and painting.

I just saw this on "This Old House" yesterday morning; scrape, orbital sander, primer, paint. Lots of elbow grease - no way around it.

Paintshaver? Check out the video, it looks great.

http://paintshaver.com/

I was scheduled to do this last summer, but had logistics problens. I haven't tried the tool, but I like the looks of it. Plan on getting one later this year.

For the non-grm way of doing it, how much would you expect to pay to have someone redo a common 2 story house? I need to have my singled house restained (I believe it's latex stain)..

DO NOT USE A GRINDER OR SANDER.

Unless you are CONFIDENT it is NOT lead based paint. It's a really bad idea. The vast majority of exterior paint pre 1970 was lead based.

The fastest and easiest way to prep for paint is to hire someone else.

Lead test kits are cheap at hardware stores and the like.

pressure washer

In reply to WonkoTheSane:

A friend had his repainted several years ago...like 5+...and it was ~$1500. I expect it's based as much on how much old paint needs removed before the actual painting begins.

Thanks for the info, Pete.. That's not nearly as bad as I was expecting! I'm assuming with my house that there's not much to be removed, hit it with a pressure washer and see what falls off kinda thing, then paint/stain over it.

petegossett wrote: In reply to WonkoTheSane: A friend had his repainted several years ago...like 5+...and it was ~$1500. I expect it's based as much on how much old paint needs removed before the actual painting begins.

I would happily pay that much. The paint and supplies cost half that amount.

SVreX wrote: DO NOT USE A GRINDER OR SANDER. Unless you are CONFIDENT it is NOT lead based paint. It's a really bad idea. The vast majority of exterior paint pre 1970 was lead based. The fastest and easiest way to prep for paint is to hire someone else.

The this old house guys were decked out in full tyvek gear and all the correct respirators. They also had a special sander with a vacuum attached.

Good advice. Call Bob Vila to do it.

foxtrapper wrote: Lead test kits are cheap at hardware stores and the like.

If 90% of the hookers had STD's, would you feel good about using a "cheap test kit" before dipping the wick?

Grinding old house paint is a terrible idea, and professional testing is not that expensive (but completely unnecessary if you use common sense practices, like don't grind paint).

A pressure washer is quick and easy, and rather safe. Why be dumb?

...even if grinding was safe, it would do a terrible job.

A grinder can't get in corners. House siding has corners on every row.

Grinders get into the corners just fine. I've used it several times on my old house.

Lead test kits don't have to be expensive to work well. That's why the agencies that check for lead use the same cheap swab kits you can buy at Home Depot.

Unless the lead swab kits have been improved, I thought they were crap. We either take paint chip samples or use an XRF.

The pressure washer will knock the loose stuff off but won't take off the paint that's still really stuck without damaging the bare wood around it. So you'll have lots of texture to the new paint job, going over lumps and bumps. It's also easy to open up the grain on the bare wood left behind, be careful not to put too much pressure into the wood as you'll really eat it up. The water gets driven into the wood pretty well so you need a dry week or so before applying primer. And use a good quality bonding primer or you'll be re-doing this soon.

You need to wash the house off with something like a quality house wash or bleach/TSP/water mix. That kills the mildew that's on the surface and keeps it from eating into the wet paint. (dry paint is mildew resistant.) Spray the bleach/tsp solution on with a tank sprayer, let it sit for a while, then rinse it off with medium pressure from the pressure washer.

If you don't get all the old paint off your paint job will only last as long as the old stuff holds on for. You'll probably have checking and loss of paint in just a few years. A paint shaver would make your paint job last a decade but you're turning it into a 2-week project with ridiculous amounts of work at that point.

I spent a week scraping, sanding, and painting my old house and it still didn't last. Old wood sided houses are really hard to get a good paint job on. It sure looked great when I was done though!!

I don't disagree with the need for proper prep work, taking a lot of time and effort.

But, the primer and paint you use also matter greatly. Cheap out here, and you'll be back doing it again far sooner than if you'd spent some money on quality.

My own take on that is having repainted my house several years ago with whatever was the highly rated Lowes paint. It started to fail within months. This time, I'm using Sherwin Williams Emerald paint, which is a lot more expensive (though 40% off sales come about every few months). It also goes on very differently, and is holding up very well, so far.

I'm also never spraying again. Spraying probably led to part of the first failure. The primer coat went on thin and dried too quickly to bond well. At least that's my theory based on observation. Brushing puts down a thicker coat which then gets worked into the wood a little with the brush, and takes longer to dry, better penetrating and bonding to the wood.

What kind of siding?