Big Project for 2012: Exterior Painting

It looks like 2012 will be the year that I tackle the biggest DIY project that I think that I have ever undertaken. I'm going to remove the aluminum siding and paint the exterior of our house. 

Our house before I trimmed the shrubbery last summer.

Now, it's not the first time I have painted the exterior. When I bought the house it was covered in aluminum siding, except for the window frames inside the storm windows and a small amount of wood trim. After living here a few years, I noticed that the coating on the siding and especially the coating on the guttering was wearing off and the aluminum was starting to show, which I guess was understandable since the siding was probably 40 or so years old.

I debated about what to do. For a brief moment I considered removing the aluminum siding since I suspected that my little Craftsmen-style cottage would gain a significant amount of charm by shedding its shell, but I was too scared of what I might find underneath. At that time, I had a 5-year plan which called for fixing up the house and selling without making any expensive investments that weren't really necessary. Not knowing what was under the siding made it too big of a risk.

So, I painted the aluminum siding. If you have aluminum siding that is in securely attached, not dented, and otherwise in good condition, I highly recommend painting it. It is pretty easy (although painting the exterior of even a small house is a long project) and 15 years later my paint job still looks good. You don't have to prime and if I remember correctly, it only took one coat. I used Sherwin Williams, regular, exterior paint. After scrubbing the siding down with soap and water, I rolled the paint on, then touched up the seams and smoothed it out with a brush. Very easy.

The only peeling paint after 15 years is the wood trim on the porch.

You're probably wondering, "If the paint has held up so well, why the heck is she going to paint?" Well, let me tell you about our ice storm. I think it was 3 years ago that we had a really ugly ice storm. The ice not only pulled down the guttering on one side of the house but the weight of the ice bent the gutter to the point that it just broke off. Replacing the guttering turned out to be complicated by the fact that there was no way to attach it to the house (which I already pretty much knew and is probably why it fell down) and the estimate was for a few thousand dollars. That was a lot of money. So we just kept putting off the decision of what to do. 

Then, last spring, along came straight-line wind . Just 3 or 4 blocks down the street it lifted the roof off a car wash, tore a sign off the front of a store, and pulled trees out of the ground by their roots, including one huge tree that crushed the front part of 2 houses. We were really lucky that our house came through with minor damage. The wind peeled off 2 or 3 pieces of siding, which after banging back and forth in the high wind, were bent and twisted and couldn't be reattached.

With those pieces of siding gone, we could see what the house looked under the siding. It looked good. There were no rotted clapboards. Sometimes, original features of houses were sawed off or torn off in order to install aluminum siding but that didn't seem to be the case here. We could see that the exposed rafter tails that are a feature of the Craftsman-style were intact. So we decided, we would remove the aluminum siding, sell it for recycling, scrape, and paint the house.

It's our big project for 2012. I am excited to bring our little house back closer to what it looked like when it was built sometime around 1929. Come back soon. I'll tell you about removing the aluminum siding.