Wood Siding Restoration

Siding Fails Around the Openings First

Almost every rotted board we cut out of a Pasadena house is within a couple of feet of a window, a door or a downpipe. Wide open wall in the middle of an elevation, up under a deep Craftsman overhang, is usually in better order than people expect. That pattern is why our siding work and our sash work end up on the same job so often: water that got in behind a failed putty line went somewhere, and where it went is the board underneath.

So the first thing we do on a siding quote is walk the elevation with an awl and press it into the suspect places. Butt joints, the underside of a sill, the bottom course over a foundation, anywhere a gutter has overflowed. Wood that takes the point with no resistance is going, and there is no coating that fixes it.

Repair Before Finish

Where a board is sound but the paint has gone, the job is scraping, spot priming and coating. Where the board is soft in a small area, epoxy consolidant and a flexible filler will hold, because that combination moves with the timber through a hot week instead of shelling off. Where a board is gone through its thickness or the joint has opened, it gets cut out and a new length spliced in. We prime the new piece on all six faces including the cut ends before it goes up, which takes an extra hour and is the difference between a repair that lasts and one that rots from the back.

Shingle walls get treated differently. Individual shingles can be slipped out and replaced without disturbing the courses above, and on a shingle elevation the honest answer is often that the wall wants a penetrating stain rather than a film forming paint. A stain fails by fading, which is a repaint. A film on shingle fails by peeling, which is a scrape, and scraping a whole shingle wall is a large and unpleasant number.

Prep on Old Paint

Pasadena housing stock is largely pre-1978, so we assume lead in the lower layers. That rules out dry scraping into open air and power sanding without extraction. Wet scraping, contained drop sheets that get folded inward, hand sanding with a vacuum where it is needed, and waste bagged rather than swept off the path. It is slower than the way exterior prep is often done and it is not something we quote around.

Edges matter more than faces. A scraped area leaves a step between old paint and bare wood, and if that step is not feathered it telegraphs straight through the finish. Feather the edges, spot prime the bare timber the same day, and caulk the joints where two pieces of trim meet, but not the horizontal laps of the siding itself, because those laps are how the wall dries.

Coating Choices and Timing

Two coats over a color change, always. One coat quotes are cheaper on the day and come back as a patchy wall in raking light, particularly going from a dark scheme to a light one. On exposed elevations we would rather do two coats on the sun side and two on everything else than stretch a single coat around the whole house.

Timing is real work here. Surface temperature matters more than air temperature, and a west wall in the afternoon can be well above what the can allows even on a moderate day, which flashes the coating off before it levels. We follow the shade around the house. In the cooler months we watch the dew point in the late afternoon and stop early rather than lay a coat down that will be damp before it skins.

Elastomeric coatings come up often on the stucco houses nearby. They bridge hairline cracks well, and on a wall that cannot dry to the outside they trap moisture and cause a bigger problem than the cracks were. On wood siding we do not use them at all.

Call (626) 427-2021 to walk an elevation. If the siding turns out to be sound and the windows are the actual problem, we will tell you that too.