In Merced
Exterior repaint, cream to brown on a Merced home
A single-storey home in Merced taken from worn cream lap siding to a deep brown with white trim and a white garage door — a full colour change on the street elevation.
What we started with
The old cream had weathered unevenly and the trim had gone past the point where another coat over the top would have held. In places the boards and the window surrounds had already been scraped back to bare material.
What we did
The driveway was sheeted, the door and window openings masked and the planting bagged before any scraping started. The siding was taken to a deep brown, with the fascia, the eaves, the window trim and the garage door finished in white.
A colour change is a different job from a repaint
Going from a pale colour to a dark one is not simply a matter of using darker paint. Cream showing through brown is far more obvious than brown showing through brown, so the coverage has to be genuinely solid rather than nearly solid — and that is decided by how the surface was prepared and how much material goes on, not by the colour in the tin.
The same is true in reverse for the trim. White over a weathered cream board will telegraph every stain and every patch underneath it unless those are dealt with first.
Preparation on old lap siding
Lap siding weathers along its bottom edges, where water sits, and around fixings. On this house the worn areas and the window surrounds were scraped back before anything else happened — visible in the first photograph as the pale, bare stretches along the trim and around the door.
Everything not being painted went under cover first: the driveway sheeted end to end, the entry masked, the shrubs against the wall bagged. That is a morning's work before a brush is opened, and it is the part of the job nobody photographs.
Dark colours in the Central Valley
A dark exterior in Merced takes a genuine beating in July. Dark surfaces run hotter, expand more and move more against their fixings than pale ones do, which is exactly why the preparation underneath matters more on a colour like this than it would on an off-white.
Both photographs were taken on the same overcast day, from the same side of the driveway.
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