Painting solutions covers unique paint issues and their solutions. You may have old cans of paint and wondering how to properly dispose of it. Or maybe you are wondering if it okay to use oil paint over a stain. We will also provide our opinion on products we have used that has solved problems for our paint company.

A Brief History of House Paint

House Paint 1920s

Lead paint had widespread usage in the colonial days. In 1786 Ben Franklin wrote a letter to a friend warning of the health dangers of lead paint. In America lead paint’s usage peaked in the 1920s. In those days the painters took a bag of lead powder and mixed it into the solvents and pigments while inhaling clouds of lead dust. Many painters died young from unknown illnesses known in the trades as “Painter’s disease.” It took many years of knowing the hazards of lead, before science and the political will overcame the lead paint manufacturer’s lobby, when in 1978 the government finally outlawed the use of lead paint completely. Now many of the old historic homes are still caked with layers of lead, it was a very tough and durable coating: Lead paint jobs were known to last twenty years. Read more

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Curing Those Winter Blues

Congress and Washington are in gridlock, the Patriots have once again failed in their quest for another Super Bowl, and though it is freezing out the ice caps are melting. It’s winter in New England, that limbo between Thanksgiving and Easter; it is time to keep warm, maybe catch up on some reading, or perhaps working on the house. Most people are too busy to keep up with their household chores: clutter gathers in the closets, there’s expired food in the refrigerator, and that damned basement seems to be filling up with every unwanted article. Home projects can leave many homeowners in paralysis; you take care of the emergencies like the water heater flooding the basement and that broken light by the front door. Painting may be the last thing on your mind. Read more

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Solving Paint Failure

Three summers ago, I got a call from Bruce Irving the former producer of WGBHʼs This Old House who had remembered me from the days my company had worked on “The Salem House” in 1995. He was at wits end with a clientʼs exterior cedar siding that didnʼt hold paint. Recently, the house had an extensive renovation that included new exterior siding and had been painted twice in the past four years by two different painting contractors and each time catastrophic paint failure occurred within the first year. I visited the site and witnessed the paint lifting and peeling from the siding like birch bark as if the house hadn’t been painted in decades. Read more

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