Rant: Spent 5 years painting our old house in Lakewood wrong

Every spring I would scrape and repaint the trim on our 1920s bungalow in Lakewood. By the next year it was always peeling again. I figured it was just the Ohio weather. Then last August a neighbor who used to do historic home restoration walked by while I was working. He asked what primer I was using and I showed him the can. He just shook his head. Said I was using latex primer on old wood that was sealed with oil based paint from the 50s. The two layers never bond right. He told me to strip it all down to bare wood and start with an oil based primer. I did that on one window last fall and it held through the whole winter without a single crack. Now I have 14 more windows and all the eaves to redo. Has anyone else dealt with old paint layers fighting each other on a prewar house?

3 comments

3 Comments

tara7936d ago

Oh man, @daniel_martin is spot on with that alcohol test trick.

daniel_martin7d ago

I have a friend who's a painting contractor and he told me the same thing years ago about latex on old oil. He said it's the number one mistake people make on older houses and it's basically like trying to glue plastic to glass. I remember him saying you can actually test it by wiping some denatured alcohol on the old paint if it gets soft it's latex if it just sits there it's oil based. Sounds like you got the right fix now but yeah that's a whole lot of work you got ahead of you stripping all that.

janarivera6d ago

My uncle did the same thing to his whole living room back in the 90s. He painted latex over oil and two winters later it was peeling off in sheets like a bad sunburn. The alcohol test is the trick, but I've also noticed people just assume because paint is expensive it must be good quality. Most folks don't realize that preparation is 90 percent of the job and paint is just the last 10 percent. It's a shame because a lot of people end up doing twice the work for something that could have been avoided with a simple test.