Painting Delano's older homes near downtown
Downtown Delano and the blocks around it were built over a long stretch, and the houses show it: two-story farmhouse styles and foursquares with wood clapboard, bungalows from the 1920s and 1930s, and postwar ramblers with a mix of wood lap and later hardboard. The old wood-sided homes are the ones that need real prep. A century of paint means thick, brittle layers that let go in sheets on the sunny south wall while holding fine on the shaded north side. Our approach on these is to scrape to a sound edge, feather-sand, prime every bit of bare wood with an oil or bonding primer, and caulk the joints that opened up as the house moved. Porch floors, columns and railings get their own plan, because they take standing water and foot traffic: a porch-and-floor enamel on the decking and a satin on the columns and rails that wipes clean. We paint the trim by brush on these homes; a sprayed finish on old millwork looks wrong.
Painting homes along the Crow River and on the edges of town
The Crow River runs right through Delano, and the properties along it deal with river-bottom humidity and spring fog the way lake homes deal with dew. Siding on the river side stays damp longer, mildew shows up on the north wall, and decks over the bank take a beating. We wash those walls with a mildewcide and give them the extra drying day before primer. Out on the edges of town, where Delano grew in the 1990s and 2000s, the housing is a different problem. Two-story and split-level homes with hardboard or first-generation LP siding are now old enough that the factory finish has chalked, the bottom edges have lost their paint, and the caulk at the windows has split. Those homes need a wash, a bonding primer on every bare edge and nail head, and a full repaint while the siding is still hard. The vinyl-sided homes from the same era can be painted too, in a color no darker than the original.
Scheduling a painting job in Delano
A Delano job starts with a walkthrough, a written estimate and color samples brushed on the house. The in-town lots are tight and the houses are close together, so we mask the neighbor's side as carefully as our customer's, and we keep the sprayer to siding where overspray can be controlled. Older homes in Delano can have lead paint under the top coats, and we prep those with the containment and cleanup the rule requires. Exterior season here runs from roughly May to mid-October. Brushing the trim and sash on an old house takes longer than the square footage suggests, so we build that time into the schedule from the start rather than rushing the last week. Daily cleanup and a final walkthrough with you close every job.
Exterior painting in Delano
Delano's old wood-sided homes are the reason exterior painting is a prep trade before it is a color trade. Scraping, sanding, priming and caulking take most of the hours on these houses, and skipping any of it shows up as peeling in two summers. Our exterior painting page walks through each step and what changes the cost on an older home. How an exterior repaint goes, and what moves the cost.
Interior and cabinet painting in Delano
Inside, Delano's older homes have plaster walls, tall painted trim and doors with a dozen coats on them. We patch cracked plaster, prime it, and repaint with brushed trim that keeps the profile sharp. In the newer subdivisions the interior work is the first real repaint after the builder's flat paint, plus sprayed cabinet enamel on early-2000s oak. Both run all winter. See interior painting and cabinet and trim enamel.
Neighborhoods we paint in Delano
- Downtown Delano
- Crow River
Painting and repair services in Delano
Painting
Exteriors and build
Questions we hearCommon painting questions in Delano
Can you paint a hundred-year-old wood-sided house in downtown Delano?
Yes, and those are some of the exteriors we like most. The work is scraping to a sound edge, sanding the edges flat, priming bare wood with a primer that bonds to old oil paint, caulking, and then two brushed or sprayed-and-back-brushed coats. Any soft sill or trim board we find during prep gets replaced before primer. Expect more prep time than a newer home, and plan for it in the schedule.
Our Delano house is by the Crow River and the north side stays damp. Does that change the job?
It changes the order and the timing. The river side gets washed with a mildewcide first, then we leave it to dry a full extra day before we prime, and we schedule that wall for the driest days of the job. The rest of the house goes on the normal schedule. It is the same thing we do on lake homes around Buffalo and Greenfield, and it is the difference between paint that holds and paint that lifts by the second spring.
What paint colors work on an older house in downtown Delano?
Colors that suit the age of the house and give the trim room to show. On a foursquare or a farmhouse two-story, that usually means a body color, a trim color and a third color on the door or sash, so the millwork reads from the street. We brush samples on the siding and look at them with you in morning and afternoon light before anything is ordered. Sheen matters too: satin on the body, semi-gloss on the trim and doors.