Help!
I’ve just purchased an old house (built in ’34) and need to repaint the wood clapboards. There is severe paint failure in some areas due to excessive coats of old oil based paint. What is the best way to remove all the old paint? I would like to get down to bear wood and put on a good primer. Sanding and scraping doesn’t work so well in all the little corners.
Also, do you caulk the vertical joints before or after priming? Or do you caulk after the finish coat?
Edited 7/12/2002 4:38:58 PM ET by fire
Edited 7/12/2002 4:39:54 PM ET by fire
Replies
prime before caulking
Could you describe what you call severe paint failure? I haven't seen paint fail due to mutiple coats of oil. I have seen it fail due to moisture problems and poor prep work.
Pifffin,
I've seen lots of paint fail from to much, too old oil. That's what typically causes alligatoring, I'm told. The linseed oil loses flexibility over time, and can't move with the seasonal expansion/contraction. Adding more layers makes it worse. I'm inclined to go all acrylic these days, because all oil paints, even primers supposedly get brittle and less flexible with age.
Also, I recall reading something recently, I forget where, but some study showed that caulked vertical joints exhibit higher degree of paint failure than uncaulked joints, because moisture eventtully gets in and can't dry out as readily as joints with no caulk, where the water can drain out. I like to put tarpaper splines behind any vertical joint, cut as tight as possible, and leave it uncaulked. That approach worked pretty well for the first few hundred years of clapboard construction.
Steve
Good points.
Painters around here scrape and sand so that much layering doesn't happen to alligator. Probably our humid climate has the effect of doing the damage before the alligatoring can happen.
I'd still like to hear the description/symptoms of presented.
Excellence is its own reward!
Unfortunately, there is no "best way" to remove tired paint. My home is 1941 with 2nd story claps and, after doing lots of thinking and figuring, I am tearing off the wood claps and replacing with fiber cement. Lots will depend on what your square footage is and access difficulty - i.e. will you need to rent scaffolding? Also, what is the "diseased" area compared to the total area?
I have used a heat gun and various scrapers on the mouldings & corner boards and that has worked well. PC makes a paint removal tool for flat work but they opted not to design a vac attachment for it. I still can't figure that out. Warner (http://paintprosusa.safeshopper.com/10/93.htm?952) makes an electric iron ($50) with a built in scraper that a pro used on a previous home of mine to do about 100 square feet of wide trim board - seemed to work very well but I have no personal experience with it.
Good Luck
Edited 7/14/2002 8:29:05 AM ET by ESVENDSON
There is a product with which you brush or roll on a thick citrus based stripper and cover it with a special paper, let it sit and pull it off, paint included, later. Our painters have used it with success to remove multiple layers of oil paint.
Your paint store should know about it.
Obviously there are lots of nocks and crannies that can only be had with scrapers and elbow grease.