Howdy,
I was talking with my neighbor the other day about the fact that the paint on his house was peeling badly and generally needing a lot of work. He was thinking about re-siding the weather side of his house because two different painting contractors had explained to him that, ” eaven if all the paint were stripped from his house and the siding was re-primed, caulked, filled and painted, the finish would not hold up because old siding dries out and doesn’t hold finish well”. I’d never heard this theory before and thought I’d see if any one had any thoughts on the subject. The house is a 1930’s salt box sort of style with no eves and gets a lot of sun. As far as I can tell the redwood siding has not undergone petrification.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Glendo.
Replies
Sounds like the siding needs a lot of prep work and he has only talked to painters who just want to push brushes without doing the hard work.
They are partly right. UV rays disintegrate old wood if it is exposed for thirty days to the point that new paint won't bond well. It bonds to a layer of crystaline wood cell particles laying on the surface of the board and then that layer flakes up and away.
Oil primers will penetrate while curing to get a better bond, but sanding is needed on old wood to get down to fresh matter.
Excellence is its own reward!
They are partly right. UV rays disintegrate old wood if it is exposed for thirty days to the point that new paint won't bond well.
I think FHB has mentioned some studies that suggest exposure to UV for as little as 2-3 days can cause adhesion problems!
Surface prep - the lost art?_______________________
10 .... I have laid the foundation like an expert builder. Now others are building on it. But whoever is building on this foundation must be very careful.
11 For no one can lay any other foundation than the one we already have--Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 3:10-11
Thanks for the info! I'm now slightly wiser than I was.Not a bad day then.
Cheerz,
Glendo.
I missed the part about it being redwood.
redwood has tannins that can interfere with some paint bonds. There are paints and stains specifically formulated for cedars and redwoods. Read labels carefully or go to a paint store with knowledgeable staff..
Excellence is its own reward!
Yeah!
Thirty days is a general rule only. South side in hot summer can suffer damage (sunburn) in only a few days but north side in winter can go for months ( tho it wioll sufer more from wind and water instead of UV in that time)
I suyppose your recent trip allowed you to test the effects of sun on the human body?.
Excellence is its own reward!
Old wood, especially redwood is the best there is unless you are talking about redwood plywood siding. Chances are, if the redwood is from the 30s then it is old growth. You can't buy that stuff anymore. New redwood is good but is not likely to hold up as well as the old growth stuff. Usually new redwood requires some kind of primer because it bleeds tannins and causes the paint to peel. Old redwood has stopped bleeding and may not require a primer.
Don't sand the wood. A rough surface will hold the paint better. Use a wire brush to prep or a high pressure wash to blast off the old paint and raise the grain. I like redwood with nothing on it. Depending on your climate and the exposure, the redwood develops a patina that endures as good as any paint. Underneath the patina just a scratch is pure redwood that is the most rot resistant wood there is. The nails are usually the weak link in redwood siding because hot dipped galvies just don't last as long as the wood. The tannins in redwood will rot the nails. If you don't have an overhang then the rain water could activate the tannins and you will need to paint to preserve the nails.
I am using salvaged redwood for my own house from a 15000 SQ FT barn in Ferndale that was damaged in an earthquake in 92. I spend a lot of time pulling square nails and cleaning the wood but when I am done there is no comparison to anything you can buy. There are often a hundred growth rings across a single 2x6. ####new growth 2x6 may have twenty rings on a good stick.
Some people don't like the look of weathered redwood but those people have no aesthetic taste whatsoever. Recently an old gothic ranch home near Ferndale was bought and the new owners painted over the patina with yellow paint. That was an unforgivable sin. A hundred years of character was ruined in a day.
I like the Behr solid color stain from Home Depot. It seems to hold up well to the weather on the old redwood without a primer. I use it on my window trim and corner boards. Under my eaves and soffits I use old redwood barnwood with no paint and it looks great. People ask, " Is that a remodel". because the new house with salvaged jumbo redwood shakes for siding looks like it has been there for a hundred years already.
Thanks for your reply. I usually rough sand old siding with 100g paper, use oil base primer and then two coats of the best latex I can find. This has worked just fine for me. When my neighbor assured me that several painting contractors had insisted that his old siding was the problem, as odd as it seemed to me,I thought I'd see if any one else had heard of this. At least there are now a couple painters my neighbor can scratch off the list of potentials.
Thanks again to all.
Glendo.
never peel! my neighbor is a safety consultant in the construction industry. his client list includes many different types of contractors and business's including PG&E, wineries, painting contractors, general contractors, etc. more than one painting contractor reccomends never-peel. we used it on our old house about 4 years ago, it came out great and still no problems. it greatly minimizes prep work, you just clean up old surface and paint with never peel as a primer, then paint. it bonds the old chipping flaking paint and leaves a primed surface ready to paint.
Who makes Never Peel?
Zinzeer makes a product called Peel Stop.
Keep right on sanding. I'm noit sure why anyone would recomend skipping that step..
Excellence is its own reward!
Your plan is fine, the surface cells of the siding deteriorate, and need to be sanded down to accept a paint system, like Pif said way back up there.
The funny thing is redwood, and cedar, will form a protection against the elements, and you will wonder why it will last forever, but you can't keep paint on it. The surface cells build up a protection layer, but that is what will flake paint. You can not build a paint system over this, you have to get back to raw wood. Your paint will bond to the top, but there is no bond to the wood.
As far as primer, ya, an alkyd primer/sealer. There is only one paint system I use for old houses, prep solid, alkyd prime, (the primer depends on the surface, I only use the primer/sealer for redwood/red cedar/mahog), and topcoat with latex.
Short version? The siding Can hold paint, with the right prep and primer.
And here I thought this was a thread about Viagra.
sheesh, Mike
No, thats over at customer service.
Glendo.
Can't imagine why your neighbor would go to the expense of residing his place when all he's got to do is GET THAT UGLY PAINT OFF THE SIDING so he can reveal the true beauty hidden underneath by whatever neanderthal, low-class, cretinous SLOB painted that poor, innocent, blameless redwood in the first place.
Sheesh.
Sand blast it (gently!!), oil it, and leave it alone. If it ain't broke, don't Fix it.
If he doesn't like the colour of the wood, tell him to move into a plastic condo somewhere and let someone with a soul have a real home....
(Hope I'm not comin' on too strong, Piff?)
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
Not at all, however San Diego is a sunny place and oil on wood finishes look good here for about 6 months, then they start to look ,,, not so good. So unless one is willing to oil-up twice a year,you paint. Also painted wood was the style when the house was built.Not all of the wood exposed is going to match or survive un-painted.
And for what its worth, I personally think a nicely painted house can look great. So can an oiled one. But probably not so much a vinyl sided one.
Cheerz,
Glendo.
The old rule on oil finishes was:
Once a day for a week,
Once a week for a month,
Once a year for life....
Yeah, that's maintenance intensive, but that rule was for a furniture finish. On a house exterior you should be able to stretch it to about the same as a decent paint job. And after you've got a bunch of oil in the wood, it becomes almost indestructible.
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
I got not problems with oiling it if that's what the customer wants. Did it some in dry climates.
Here redwood turns to an ugly black though so paint is better cover.
now on CVG Fir, that's another story. Paint it and you get hung by your little fingers....
Excellence is its own reward!
Okay, you got me. 'CVG' ???
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
Clear
Vertical
Grain
.
Excellence is its own reward!
He knew that ..... He was just testing... LOL
I didn't know you were into mythological creatures!
I think I saw a CVG once, about eighteen years ago, but it was already part of something so it doesn't count as buyable stock.
I also saw some SPF-KD/SS 2x6's once, in a 40-year-old cottage, but I don't want you to think I'm bragging, it was pure luck (LOL).
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
Sure am glad there are others that appreciate old growth redwood siding with it's natural patina. I've been salvaging the old siding of of to be demoed houses and saving it for a while now. Makes me glad of the only real value of vinyl siding which is to protect that old growth siding for guys like me that showup decades later with a smile on his face.
Found some nice 1x10 clapboards left revealed under some yellow vinyl siding someone thought valuable enough to salvage. Discovered it was an old timberframe and the siding still had the washington state mill stamp on the back side.
Some of those lengths were 16 ft long.
heh heh. Sometimes life is grand.
An old customer asked me to rewire his laundry room and install a new dryer and vent it for him. When I put the hole-saw into the wall, I expected an inch of pine board then sawdust or straw for insulation--the farmhouse was of unknown age but we figured it at about 125-150 years old minimum.
Hole saw bottomed out, so I pulled it and chipped the plug out of the wall and stuck the saw in again. Same thing.
An hour later, I had the pleasure of informing the customer that he was the owner of a pure red cedar square-log house. With walls 12" thick....covered with, get this, white cedar shingles painted with grey deck paint.
Now all I gotta do is convince him to strip the shingles and restore the place before his daughter the hot-shot real-estate agent convinces him to burn it down and build a condo triplex....
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
Forgot to post a pic of the place.Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
Dino- that is a real story worth telling. It must be great up in your next of the woods with all the access to timber they had back then.
Reminds me of the stories you read about companies searching for dense sunken logs in the rivers from the old timbering heyday and lifting them out with balloons and helicopters
I've got a buddy--my kid's godfather--who built two round-log houses (one for him, one for his father) out of lake-salvaged logs from what is now the Basketong Reservoir. That area had been intensively logged about a hundred years earlier, and there are old pictures of the southern end of this huge lake (we're talking beaucoup square miles here) completely covered with floating logs. There was no way to recover--or even to find--sunken logs at that time, so they just stayed down there, perfectly preserved in water that never gets warmer than about 5-10 degrees C at the bottom.
My bud and his dad would dive on a log and attached a wire-rope slings to it, just like you hook up a tree to a skidder, and then winch it up onto a work barge. Most of the wood was Doug fir; butt sizes about 18-24"; some as large as 36 were too big to use in the house wall as they were and were chain-saw milled on site for lumber. If I remember the story right, they eventually brought up enough wood to pay the entire expenses of the recovery operation and for the wood they kept for themselves, plus some ca$h left over to buy shingles, spikes, and gas for the chainsaws, etc., not to mention brew for the crew. (Fish for breakfast, lunch, and supper only cost the trouble of digging a few worms out of the leaf-mould....)
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
Sounds like that occurred not really that long ago. Makes me wonder if there would still be salvagable logs down there.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
Basketong Log Fest?.
Excellence is its own reward!
Is that now a request for 2 haulers?
Just joshin'
i've got the travel budget of a hobo.
Excellence is its own reward!
You've got the same travel budget as I do. But a fall fest up here somewhere sounds like fun. How do we go about setting it up? I could suggest the weekend after labour day; all the tourists have gone home, it's peaceful, cool, and quiet, and we'd have the local Provincial Park campground pretty much to ourselves....
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
You got diving gear?
Just a sleeveless wetsuit; I don't do scuba but I know a guy who does. If I have to build a dock in deep water I call him.
If you're getting serious about salvaging this theoretical unlocated log pile, we're gonna need more than a scuba set: more like a tug, a work barge, and a 40-foot log transporter so you can get the stuff home. I can drive the tugboat but I haven't got a clue where to drive it to. Seems like an expensive way to go fishin'....
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
Man, oh Man! Did you see the size of the mosquitoe in that picture? legs as big as tent poles!.
Excellence is its own reward!
That's no mosquito--this week he's calling himself Spiderman. (Last week it was Lucky Luke, the cowboy who draws faster than his own shadow....)Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
Heh, heh--forgot to post a little visual encouragement....
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
Roar! Now there's a thought.
It's just that darn scavangeritus acting up again.
I get a case of it every time I have to use new man-made materials.
This was probably about 15 years ago or so. If there's any wood left-- got to be some but how far out and how deep--would be hard to know. People who've found substantial caches of sunken logs tend to be almost as closed-mouthed about precise locations as about those of sunken Spanish galleons....
Dinosaur
'Y-a-tu de la justice dans ce maudit monde?
I was thinking that the redwood on your house must be like most of the redwood siding in Northern Callifornia. You hardly ever see smooth redwood except for decking.. Most of the siding here is at least resawn. Could you see trying to sand that? I guess you have some of that uncommon smooth stuff. The stuff I get is salvaged or comes from my brothers chainsaw mill. That stuff is not only rough but downright shaggy. When I paint that stuff the paint never peels. That is why I never bother to waste time with primer. I forget the rest of the world is using that store bought redwood.
I rip a lot of the trim so there are smooth surfaces that I have to deal with. I usually draw the smooth edge along the bandsaw to rough it. Also I draw a sharp handsaw criss cross to rough it up.