“Should I use oil or latex paint?” It’s a question I get asked a lot. Oil vs latex, the two paints are very different, and each has their strengths and weaknesses. In this post, I’ll try to help you figure out when and where each type of paint will excel so you can make the […]
When you have dozens of coats of paint on trim and woodwork, touching up paint is not always as simple as grabbing a brush and going to town. When old paint chips off, you’re likely left with a crater in the surface. The layers of paint that have built up over the years have made […]
There’s a lot to know about lead paint before you start renovating an old house. Lots more than I can cover in one post and rather than trying to search through years of archives, I thought it would be helpful to create a resource page dedicated to helping you work lead safe in an old […]
I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about lead paint, so I wanted to try to address some of those questions to make folks feel a little safer in their old homes. If you live in a house built before 1978, you need to know how to test for lead paint, especially if you have […]
Today’s question comes from Jacques: “What would you recommend for plaster walls and wood trim/mouldings on a 90 year old house? My wife and I are planning on having kids, so we’d like to get the house lead free in a safe way.” Jacques, in a 90-year old house you’re not as likely to have lead paint […]
One of my first large scale window restoration jobs was to fully restore all 38 sashes on a 1950s Colonial Revival. I had restored close to 100 old windows by the time this job came around and had gotten pretty good. My glazing putty had nice clean corners and I had developed a pretty good […]
If you own an old house, you have paint problems…somewhere. It may be from a poor paint job at some point or a paint job that is just too old. Keeping your house painted properly, especially the exterior, is imperative to the long term care of your house. Exterior elements deteriorate quickly without a protective […]
In Choosing Exterior Paint Colors For Your Historic House we discussed how to go about picking the right colors for a historic home. Will you choose colors that are historically accurate to your home, historically appropriate for the time period your home was built or will you just wing it and pick your own color […]
Picture this: You’re demo-ing your 1920s bathroom when your contractor points to some green-tinged paint near the tub. “Water damage,” he says, reaching for his scraper. “We’ll strip it all out.” STOP. You might be about to destroy a piece of antimicrobial technology so advanced, modern paint companies are still trying to replicate it. Here’s […]
Let’s talk about sandblasting. Maybe you’ve heard that it’s a fast way to strip paint or clean up wood. Some even claim it’s an “easy fix” for historic restoration. Well, I’m here to give you the lowdown on why sandblasting wood is like using a flamethrower to clean your kitchen: dangerous, damaging, and definitely not […]
Sandpaper is an integral part of any almost every kind of home repair- especially finish work. Painting, carpentry, drywall, flooring, they all need sandpaper at some point and you need to know what grit sandpaper for each application. There are a least 1,387,902 different types of sandpaper (that may be a guess, but there are […]
If you’re restoring historic wood or steel windows then you’re probably dealing with glazing putty rather than the modern glazing gasket systems. Glazing putty is a wonderfully versatile product that was used for centuries to install glass into the earliest windows. In the 1950s and 1960s it began to fall out of favor and things […]
