Painting exterior siding
Posted by Jim Morris on Sun Jun 11 15:11:28 -0700 2006
I took off a month from work and needed a project, so I decided to repaint the outside of my house. It is an old house with wood siding, the last time I had it painted I asked the contractor to strip the old paint off first as it was peeling badly, I suggested he sandblast it or something first. That was a bad idea, he rented a sandblaster and had never used one and discovered you can't sandblast wood siding (the siding disappears :). Rather than wait for me to come home and tell me about it he decided to go ahead and paint anyway over the old paint. Needless to say that paint job did not last long, you can't paint on top of old peeling paint and get away with it.
So this time I decided I'd do the job myself, after researching the web for how to remove old paint, it was apparent the experts were saying you cannot avoid scraping it off, no mention of sandblasting, but power washers were mentioned, saying they could damage the siding too. Ignoring this I got myself a 2,500 psi gas power washer (Exccel, Home Depot, $299), and indeed found that if you get the head close enough to strip off the paint you also damage the wood, you can get the loosest paint off when the head is about a foot from the wall without damaging the wood, but not much paint comes off, I found the rotating head was most effective.
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