Sly Fox (Dark red) is the new color! (exterior)

Whew… That was a ton of work. My exhauster painter (yes, just 1 painter) spent about 50 hours scraping the old flaky paint off house until practically nothing was left. He started about May 8th with 8 hours of power washing. Then, after a couple days on other jobs he came back in earnest and started scraping and priming. It seems this house was only painted twice in the last 75 years, so it was in pretty bad shape. Some siding needed to be replaced due to rotting, but 95% of it was quite good. Also, the design of the roof made for some extra abuse on the siding.

All in all, Mark spent 140 hours cleaning, scraping, priming, masking and spraying the house. We also found a nice guy to help out with some extra labor for two days. Furthermore, my father-in-law and I put in a couple days work at the end, in order to get everything done by Thursday night (May 31).  We still need to do about half the trim, but it looks fine for now.

When it was done, it took probably 200 hours of labor and $1500 of paint, supplies and equipment rental. Thanks, Home Depot (only 2 miles away). They always seem to have everything we need. Their airless sprayer (rented) worked great, and I kept having to buy more paint, late into the evening. Dark red (Behr: “Sly Fox”) needs a lot of paint to get good coverage. We used a total of 23 gallons.

Mark did a great job. He is a very experienced painter and really knows his stuff – he has painted industrial jobs, auto body and residential. He keeps a slightly shifted schedule than what I am used to, but he cares deeply about the jobs he finds and sometimes works 12 or more hours in a day if conditions are right. I found him on craigslist, advertising himself as the “$100 a day painter.” He painted (and prepped) all the interior rooms as well. Let me know if you want his contact info.

Our first guests showed up the day after we finished painting, and we (me and my in-laws) worked hard on Friday to clean up the house, inside and out, so it didn’t even look like the construction zone it was the day before.

Check out these before and after photos:

 

Before:

After: