Advice from Blue Door Painters about Using Paint to Accent Your Garden

The first thing that usually comes to mind when a homeowner sets out to decorate his or her outdoor space, is the landscaping.  Foliage, flowers, mulch, and hardscaping – the variety of colors available in the natural elements of a garden are so rich that most people don’t think about painting.  But using paint intelligently can enhance both the beauty of the garden and the structural integrity of its elements.

So what, you might ask, might you actually paint in the garden?  The answer is simple: anything but the plants!  Fences, trellises, latticework, large ceramic pots, decorative boulders, retaining walls – even hardscaping elements like decks or patios – can all be painted.  The trick for the exterior decorator is to determine when the color options available with paint are superior to the natural colors of the substrates.  When a more natural look is desired, stains and clear coatings are an alternative option to gain the structural protection of paint while keeping the look of the uncoated substrate.

One way to use paint in the garden to maximize its beauty is to pick one color for all of your garden accents.  If you intend to garden with color (flowers, etc.), your best bet is to pick a neutral color (like black, white, gray, beige/cream, silver, or gold).  Paint fences, retaining walls, trellises, gazebos all in the same color, and then arrange the richness of your garden around them and the accent color will act as a three-dimensional frame.  Using the same color in small doses everywhere makes it so that an extremely diverse garden still contains a unifying theme.

Another way to use paint is to create splashes of bright color that harmonize with the plants in your garden.  This bold use of exterior painting can produce a daring, visually sophisticated effect.  Take a large planter box, for example, and paint it bright red, then fill it with bright red tulips, and the two reds will create a beautiful visual echo.  Or paint the railroad ties in a retaining wall a bright primary blue and ochre (in stripes), and then frame it with a bed of marigolds backed by a large cluster of deep indigo irises.  You can use any of the color-matching techniques we have offered in our color combination series to develop a color combo, and spread the colors across the plants, flowers and paint colors.   The synthetic planes and tones of painted hardscaping look truly amazing when harmonized with the natural elements of your landscape.

One final technique, mentioned briefly above, is to use coatings that protect and enhance the natural colors of the substrate for a sturdier and more vivid finish.  Wood, concrete, and masonry are the most common substrates for garden hardscaping.  Stain and varnish can be used on exterior wood, like fences, trellises, or wooden retaining walls.  Clear coatings are the best non-colored protective coat for concrete or masonry, although masonry stains are also a viable option, and can look particularly handsome with brick.  Using stains and sealants help your garden hardscaping resist the elements, while retaining their natural colors and appeal.

Blue Door Painters describes three important terms in coatings technology.

Effectively painting a wall requires designing a chemical which changes from a liquid to a solid in a very precisely choreographed manner.  If it changes too soon, the coating on the wall will be chunky, rather than smooth.  In addition to looking unattractive, a chunky coating will not be likely to be continuous, and the gaps and breaks in the layer will cause the paint to fail.  On the other hand, a substance that is too runny, and stays in liquid form too long, will run and sag before it hardens, once again creating an unattractive and discontinuous coating that is prone to failure.  Chemists and paint artisans have struggled for years to come up with the perfect chemical mixtures that magically transform from smooth, continuous liquid to solid, sturdy solid at the right time and in the right way.  To do so, scientists had to continuously tweak the viscosity, flow, and leveling of their concoctions.

When you are shopping for paint today, you will find products on the market that still possess a range of properties as far as their state of matter is concerned.  Understanding viscosity, flow, and leveling will help you select the right paint for your job, and will allow you to notice when your paint is not performing as it should.

Viscosity is the paint’s resistance to flow – simply put, how ‘heavy’, ‘thick’, or ‘sticky’ it is.  If paint is runny, it has low viscosity, while if it is tacky and thick, it has high viscosity.  Ideally, right out of the can paint should have the viscosity of a warm maple syrup – runny, but not as runny as water, and with enough thickness to create a slight relief when applied to a surface thickly.  The desired paint viscosity (and the paint performance in general) will vary greatly based on the temperature.  At high temperatures, the viscosity is always lowered, and therefore a higher-viscosity paint is desired to compensate.  The opposite is true for cold temperatures.  In the Washington DC / Northern Virginia area, where the seasons are so variable, attention needs to be payed to the timing of when the project is undertaken to determine what viscosity should be aimed for.

Flow involves both the viscosity of the paint, but it also involves the surface tension.  The surface tension tends to vary according to the viscosity (lower viscosity has more flow and lower surface tension); but this is not a direct correlation.  Various additives can change the chemistry of the paint to create the desired flow even with variation in the viscosity.

When the flow if the paint is not ideal, the coating will demonstrate failure patterns such as running, sagging, chunking, or cratering.  While improper application (and insufficient prep) can also cause these problems, if they happen in your coating, the first thing you should do is check your paint can and contact the manufacturer to make sure that the paint is performing as it ought to.

Finally, the leveling of there paint describes how flat of a surface it can make.  Good leveling requires ideal viscosity and flow, but it also relies on chemical complexities in the paint to neutralize  common issues like fisheyes, craters, blistering, alligatoring, streaking, and other problems that come from a coating that is not perfectly smooth.  Since there will never be a perfectly flat substrate, nor a perfectly ideal administration, the paint will always have to correct for these imperfections with its chemistry.  Paints like Sherwin Williams’ Duration excel at creating smooth, level coatings out of less than ideal conditions.

If you are thinking of painting your home and you want further advice on paint or painting technology, or you are looking for either a free estimate or further product recommendations feel free to contact us!

 

Blue Door Painters Discusses The Hows and Whys of Stripes in Interior Design

Stripes are probably the oldest and most well-known of all the world’s patterns.  Emblazoned into our evolutionary heritage from billions of years of living amongst landscapes like the forest or the grassland where the environment is full of regularly repeating vertical lines, there is something about stripes that will never go out of style.  The use of stripes in fashion has been a hot topic for as long as fashion has existed, and the use of stripes in interior design is an equally potent subject.  There are several methods for creating stripes in an interior, and several reasons for doing so; in this blog Blue Door Painters has distilled volumes of design wisdom into two techniques and three tips for tapping into the power of stripes.

Techniques

1. Wallpaper.  Wallpapering is the easiest method to get stripes into your interior.  Since wallpaper is produced in a factory, it is readily available in a huge variety of colors, patterns, and materials.  You can get wide stripes, thin stripes, bright or dull colors, vertical, horizontal, or diagonal orientations, or even more elaborate striped patterns that involve curves or irregular spacing.  Many of the visual affects available with wallpaper would not be easily duplicated in paint without the services of a muralist.  The downside to wallpaper is that it can be difficult to find a wall covering that has the perfect combination of texture, durability, and re-coat potential.  Some wall coverings have a beautiful finish, but are not washable and cannot be recoated, while others are more durable, but less attractive.  Talk to your estimator for a free color consultation, and Blue Door Painters would be happy to orient you to the varieties of wallpaper available on the market.

2. Shadow Striping.  With enough patience, you can create a wide variety of striped patterns with paint.  While patterns that are both complex and disciplined (like stripes) are tedious to create with a paintbrush or roller, the benefit of paint over wallpaper is that paint sometimes offers a superior balance of texture and resilience, and that when compared to the higher end wallpapers, paint is a lot cheaper to purchase and install.  Stripes are usually created with paint by painting one coat, then taping the sections you want to stay that color and painting a second coat to fill in all the gaps.  One way to use this method to produce an elegant and subtle effect (and one that effectively mimics high-end wallpaper) is called “shadow striping”.  With shadow striping, you create stripes that are the exact same color, but alternate the level of gloss.  That way, even though the color stays consistent, the light plays across the stripes in a subtly eye-catching way that makes the room look elegant.

Tips

1. Horizontal vs. Vertical.  “Vertical stripes make me look fat,” is a commonly heard complaint in the world of fashion, reflecting the unique power of stripes to create visual contours.  In interior design, however, sometimes looking “fat” is a good thing – if you want a small bedroom to look wider, for example.  As a general rule of thumb, stripes enhance the dimension that they run in: vertical stripes make a space look taller, horizontal stripes make a space look wider.  So if you have a room with low ceilings, vertical stripes might help you add a little height, while if you have a room that feels cramped, successful application of ‘fattening’ horizontal stripes may help open up the space.

2. Width of the Stripes. The second way to use stripes to create contour is by varying the width of the stripes.  With vertical stripes, a wall appears longer if a significant number of stripes fit along its length.  So up to a point, the narrower the stripes, the larger the space appears.  However, after a certain point, if stripes are made too narrow, they merge into a uniform texture, visually speaking, and lose their ability to contour space.  So the trick is to find the perfect balance.  For larger rooms, like dining or living rooms, 6-8 inches is a good “sweet spot” width, whereas smaller rooms like bedrooms or bathroom work better with a narrower 3-5 inch width.  When working with horizontal stripes, the same rule of thumb applies based on the height of the room’s ceiling.

3. Accents vs Main Coverage.  It is certainly possible to cover an entire interior with tasteful stripes, but another way to tap into the power of stripes is to use them as an accent feature.  Stripes can be used on alternate walls, with the walls in between left solid.  They can be used in alcoves or on slanted or odd-shaped ceilings perched under the eaves of upstairs bedrooms.  They can be used on doors or window trim.  They can also be used in conjunction with chair rail molding, with the stripes placed either above or below the molding, and the solid color on the opposite side.  There are a million creative options; keep your mind open and you can certainly find the perfect way to tap into the power of stripes.

Tools of the Trade #1: Advice on Selecting the Right Paintbrush from Washington DC and Northern Virginia Painting Contractor

You’ve cleaned, sanded, and primed the trim around your living room windows, selected a high-quality acrylic latex paint, and are ready to get started.  There is only a little bit of area to cover, so you’ve calculated that a quart of topcoat will be sufficient to get the job done.  One thick layer over the entire surface.  But to your dismay, as the paint starts to dry on the areas you have already painted, you can see streaks in the paint where the brush strokes interrupted the even surface, allowing the undercoat to show through.  You’re going to need another coat, which means you are going to need to do another round trip to the paint store.  Frustrated, you return to your paint can to read the label. “Self-priming, one-coat performance”, it boasts.  And its reputation claims it lives up to that boast (justifying the $30/quart that you payed for it).  You did all your prep work right, and you even primed, though your superpaint claims you didn’t have to.  So what went wrong?

The culprit in your disappointing coverage might be the often overlooked hero of a paint job: the paintbrush.  Exploring a paint store, you will notice a wide range in cost between high-end and rail paintbrushes.  In fact, in many stores you’ll find the top-shelf brushes stashed behind locked glass displays, like power tools or DVDs.  Such a fuss over paintbrushes seems over the top, but a high-quality paintbrush can make a world of difference in your paint job, and an extra $10 to buy a good one can save you $30 in extra paint – plus the time it takes to paint an extra coat.

So how do you tell the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to paint brushes?  Just leave it to the price tag?  Not necessarily, although you will find general improvement in the brushes as the prices go up.  The features of a good paint brush are as follows:

Material.  It is important that the material your brush is made of is a good match for your paint.  Brushes can be natural or synthetic, and there are many varieties of each.  Synthetic brushes can be made of nylon, polyester, or nylon-polyester blend.  For latex paint, a nylon-polyester blend is most suitable.  Pure nylon will become limp after a few hours painting, and pure polyester is harder to clean and loses bristles more easily.  Natural brushes are usually made out of china bristle: the hair of a Chinese long-haired swine.  China bristle brushes are ideal for work with alkyd paints; though they do not last as long as synthetic paints, their bristles hold the oil paints better and allow for more even transmission.

Tuft Density.  A good way to test for a high quality brush is to brush your hand with it a few times, feeling the bristles.  Cheaper paintbrushes tend to be thinner, more uneven, and less orderly.  A paintbrush that is going to spread the paint evenly across your surface without leaving streaks will feel soft, thick, and even across your hand, with no errant flyaway bristles.

Durability.  The best way to ruin a good paintbrush is not to take care of it properly.  Every painter has times when she leaves the brush sitting in a can of paint and goes out to lunch, where she leaves a little bit too much time between finishing painting and cleaning it off, or where she tosses it into the toolbox without proper care and storage.  All of these habits will take months off the life of your paintbrush, and will make the quality of your paint jobs start to deteriorate.  That said, the lower quality the paintbrush, the less forgiving it will be of the normal wear and tear that comes with its role in life.  A good brush should have bristles anchored firmly in the ferrule, not pulling away, and the bristles should lay straight.  It should easily keep its shape when subjected to light pressure, and should be made of the appropriate material to chemically resist the type of paint you intend to use.

So when you’re picking out a new brush, look past the price tag and really get a feel for the brush: and then take careful not of how it performs over time.  And if you’re using a brush that you have used again and again, consider the way you’ve been treating it.  And look to the quality of your paint jobs to give you hints about whether your paintbrush is performing up to speed. 

Blue Door Painters Color Consultants Offer Advice on the Right Color for Your Washington, DC Business

Confirming the intuition of artists and designers, psychological researchers have recently accumulated significant evidence proving that colors do indeed produce distinct psychological impressions.  While the distinctions between colors may be subtle, and each person’s impression of any given color may be slightly different, by following the code of color established by research you can use color to its maximal advantage in the home and business.

Marketing executives everywhere are aware that color can help you sell.  Bright colors draw attention, muted colors command respect, pastels invoke the sympathetic feminine… Manipulating color in brochures and websites is an important enough task that it puts food on the table of many a graphic designer.  But color can also be utilized in commercial interior design in order to maximize in-store sales.  Depending on what you are trying to sell, and who you are trying to sell it to, you will need to develop a different color placement strategy.  If you are decorating or remodeling your business, take advantage of Blue Door Painter’s complimentary color consultation service, or follow the basic guidelines outlined below to make color into one of your star salesmen.

If you are selling . . . food at a restaurant,
You want to use . . . warm, spicy, bold colors (reds, oranges, saffron yellows).
And you want to avoid . . . cool pastels, dull neutrals.
Warm colors stimulate the appetite and produce a lively, down-home atmosphere that encourages customers to relax and eat up!  In contrast, cool colors and neutrals have a more serious, formal feel that can keep customers in a more intellectual or professional mood and therefore make them less inclined to kick back, linger, and order a second round.

If you are selling . . . arts and crafts, home decorations, toys, or knick-knacks
  You want to use . . . lively red, pink, orange, purple, and/or browns
  And you want to avoid . . . gray, dull neutrals, cool blues or greens
Artistic and homey products like those listed above are best sold in an atmosphere that feels like fun.  In order to create a ‘fun’ atmosphere, a combination of warm colors (like red and orange) with the “creative” color purple and a little bit of earth tones (like tan or brown) mixed in, you create a lively and earthy feel that showcases your wares.

If you are selling . . . electronics, high-end furniture or jewelry
You want to use . . . cool colors, classic neutrals, dark solids (navy blue, hunter green, maroon) black trim
  And you want to avoid . . . bright colors, warm colors
Cool colors and classic neutrals trimmed with other neutrals or, for more contrast, with black (like black and white, black and cream, or gray and pale blue), similar to the deep tones of most of the primary colors (like navy, hunter, or maroon) produce a more elegant, serious visual effect.  This decor, while it is more somber than is usually desirable in a storefront, is perfect for more expensive retail items (like electronics, furniture, and jewelry), because it inspires trust in the store that will make customers more likely to make high-dollar purchases.

 

 

 

Managing Mold: Blue Door Painters Discusses the Household Nuisance and What to Do About It

You open the door to your laundry room, and are greeted by a dark, irregular stain with a fuzzy texture on the wall above your washing machine.  As you walk closer to it, you notice a dank, musty smell.  You don’t have any personal experience with household mold – other than periodically bleaching off the black stuff growing between your shower tiles – but you have a vague memory of hearing about Black Mold on the news a couple years ago, and learning that it was Really, Really Bad.  Screaming, you drop your laundry and run upstairs to book a hotel room.

But before you short sale your home, take a few minutes to learn the basics about mold, mildew, and all the other microscopic fungal visitors that plague households.  While it’s true that some forms of mold, in some locations, can be a big problem, in most cases mold issues can be remediated with straightforward moisture control, substrate replacement, and coating solutions.

Mold and mildew are both microscopic members of the Fungal Kingdom.  While in the scientific world ‘mildew’ is a type of fungus that grows on plants, in the common parlance ‘mildew’ has come to mean a relatively specific subset of mold species that grow in bathrooms.  Without being particularly precise about the actual genus of the organisms involved, ‘mildew’ tends to refer to the relatively harmless growths that are found (and removed regularly) from bathrooms, while ‘mold’, or ‘black mold’ is the home-destroying menace that inhabits a house’s HVAC system.

In actuality, there are over 100,000 species of mold, and the spores (microscopic ‘seeds’) of many varieties are in the air all the time.  It is not possible to rid your home of mold spores altogether, nor are mold spores in small amounts particularly dangerous.  It is only when the conditions are right for those spores to bloom, populating your home in high concentrations, and when you are dealing with a particularly virulent genus of mold, that you have the severe ‘black mold’ problem that caused such a scare in the past twenty years.

Mold spores in the air need two things in order to grow: a source of organic material, and a source of moisture.  Unless your home is entirely built of plastic, it is full of organic material: wood, drywall, masonry, carpet, linens, furniture: all of these can provide ideal food for a mold bloom.  Moisture is the element that is ideally under your control; mold needs its environment to be constantly moist in order to bloom.  For that kind of moisture to be found in the home, either something is leaking, there’s a temperature differential that causes condensation to collect constantly in the same spot, or the area lacks adequate ventilation.

You will usually notice mold because you can see it when it blooms.  Some types of mold will appear regularly in your bathtub or shower (the most moist area of your home), and can be eliminated with a bleach-based cleaner.  Other molds will bloom on walls or ceilings.  These molds can be tested for their particular strain; the molds of the stachybotrys genus are more virulent, and need to be carefully contained during renovation so that they do not release toxic spores into the air in high quantities.  Other forms of mold, though they are not as vicious to the respiratory system, should also be removed.  Seeking a professional mold diagnosis is a good precaution before proceeding with mold removal; an expert has methods of determining the difference between a nuisance and a major problem.  The expert will also help you determine if your mold bloom is localized, or if it is actually blooming in the HVAC system.  In the HVAC system, mold is a much greater risk because the spores and toxins are circulated throughout the household air. A localized bloom, however, is a relatively mundane and straightforward problem.

Once the mold variety and the degree of risk have been established, you need to figure out the mold’s source of moisture, and take steps to eliminate it.  Find and fix any leaks, and adjust the ventilation in the moldy area to ensure that the area stays dry.  If you skip this critical step, you may find yourself staring at a moldy patch in the exact same spot three months after fixing it.

Finally, the moldy area of substrate (drywall, wood, masonry, etc), needs to be carefully removed, taking care not to disturb the spores, and replaced with a fresh patch of substrate.  Then the entire region should be primed and recoated, preferably with moisture-resistant and mold-resistant coating products.  Intelligent use of coatings can go a long way toward stopping the growth of mold, as a good coating can provide both a moisture barrier and a chemical layer that is toxic to the mold and makes it unable to safely access the vulnerable substrate.  Moisture-resistant chemicals and mildewcide additives have been mixed into many top paint brands for exactly that reason; Blue Door Painters estimators are happy to discuss product options with you and provide you with a full-service mold remediation treatment.

Discussion of pigments and the hiding powers of a fresh coat of paint from a Washington, DC area contractor

Standing facing a deep evergreen-colored dining room with a gallon of interior flat paint tinted a nice, neutral cream, you expect to face some challenges regarding coverage.  Meaning, you expect that your first coat of warm cream might have some strange greenish undertones showing through the new topcoat.  What you might not expect is that the same issues also come up in the opposite scenario: when you have white trim, say, and you want to paint it a deep navy blue.  Whenever you paint over a color that has a drastically different value than your chosen shade, you will run into problems with coverage.

What is the meaning of the word value, in the paint lexicon?  Well, value is one of three characteristics used to classify color, and it refers to how light or dark a given shade is.  If you could imagine taking three teaspoons of blue paint, and mixing thirty drops of white into one, thirty drops of black into the second, and thirty drops of gray into the third, then you can picture three shades of blue with three different values: one dark, one light, and one neutral.  The other two characteristics of color are the hue, which describes the actual color on the basic wheel (i.e., red, orange, yellow, green, etc.), and the saturation, which describes how much the shade has been dulled by a hue-neutral color (like black, white, or gray).  The hue of a color is obviously of utmost importance in the color’s final impression, and the saturation, which is a measure of how bright or dull a color is, also plays a very strong role in the aesthetic effect.  When it comes to coverage in a paint system, however, the difference between the values of the existing paint and the new topcoat is the factor that most greatly effects how much the undercoat will show through.

The reason that value plays such a strong role in coverage is that the value of a color is the measure of how much light that color reflects, and how much it absorbs.  If an undercoat has a lighter value than the new paint, any gap in the fresh paint will reflect a significant bit more light, and stand out from the overcoat – and vice versa for an undercoat with a much darker value than the new paint.

The keys to adequate coverage, therefore, are:

1) Pick a primer that is the same value as your new shade of paint.  If you are painting a pastel over a dark color, prime it with white; but if you are painting a dark color over a light one, you need to find a primer that comes in a shade of gray that is the same value as the new color.

2) Buy high-quality paint.  Paint has four components: the binder, the pigments, the solvents, and the additives.  The solvents are usually clear fluids, the additives invisible chemicals, and the binder a clear, sticky, film-forming substance that provides the physical framework for the new coating.  But it is the pigments that give the paint its color – and its opacity.  While there has always been a wide array of options for black-hiding (i.e., creating an opaque coating out of dark colors), it has only been in the past 100 years that paint technology has progressed to allow for safe, effective white hiding, which is the use of light-colored pigments to create reflective opacity.  The advent of titanium dioxide, an oxidized metal that has become both cheap and effective at creating strongly opaque pastels, created a class of paints that made white hiding truly be an option.  Cheaper paints will not have much true titanium dioxide in them, though; they will be full of cheaper, less effective substitutes called “filler pigments”.  Filler pigments add to the bulk, but not the opacity, of the film coating, and therefore lead to lower quality paint.

3) Prepare your surface adequately and use proper equipment.  If your primer values match, and your paint is high quality, but you are still seeing through your new coating, you might be failing somewhere in the execution.  Make sure that your brushes and rollers are high quality and well-matched to the job, and also make sure that your surface has been adequately cleaned, sanded, and scraped prior to application- especially if it is gloss or semi-gloss!

 

Design Tips From Washington, DC Area Painting Contractor

Our final color combo special takes a mathematical approach to generating color schemes that span the entire color wheel.  Depending on how many colors you want to use, the technical name of this color scheme changes (three colors make a ‘tertiary’ scheme, while four colors is called a ‘quaternary’ scheme, etc), so we are going to group these color combos together under the header “fractional”.  Fractional color schemes are the trickiest, boldest – and potentially, most rewarding – of all the classic combinations outlined in our series.  For more conservative color-matching techniques, check out our monotonal, monochromatic, or analogous specials, or for daring combos that use the simple trick of balancing across the wheel to create shocking matches, check out our complementary and split-complementary specials.  For remodelers in the Washington, DC or Northern Virginia area who need some extra help, feedback, or advice with your design projects, please feel free to take advantage of Blue Door Painters free color consultation service!

Fractional color combinations involve dividing the color wheel into even segments, as you would cut slices of a pie.  First, decide how many colors you want.  Most design schemes involve at least three colors: a main color, a trim color, and an accent color.  For interiors, don’t forget that your furniture and accessories will add colors to your composition (and potentially change the effect), and for exteriors, your landscaping, hardscaping, and architectural ‘givens’ (roof, chimney, etc) will also affect your composition, and should be included in the color scheme.  So you may be working with more colors than you realize.

Once you know how many colors you will be using, decide the color that you want to start with.  Your initial color does not have to be your main color – it could be a given color that you can’t avoid (like roof shingles that you don’t feel like painting), or an accent color that you are excited about – you get to decide where to put each color in the combo – and how much of it to use.

Starting from that color, imagine slicing into the color wheel as you would a pie.  Make a slice at your initial color, and then divide the pie into the number of slices equal to the number of colors that you want in your combination.  Make sure each piece of the pie is even!  Once you are finished, you should be looking at a wheel cut into equal pieces.  Take the color at the edge of each slice, and you will have the collection of hues that make up the foundation of your fractional color scheme.

As an example, for a fractional color scheme involving three colors (called a ‘tertiary’ scheme) that takes as an initial color a reddish-brown roof tile, you would divide the wheel into thirds.  Your red hue would therefore be matched to a blue and a yellow, perhaps skewed slightly toward blue-violet and yellow-green if your roof tile had an orange tint to it.  You could choose a pale, ‘cool’ (i.e., subtly green-tinted) yellow for your siding, and then paint your shutters a similar color to your roof tile (perhaps slightly bolder to make your windows ‘pop’), and save the blue for a bright accent door.

So now you’ve learned six methods for picking colors, and you have hopefully come to recognize the power of the color wheel as a design tool.  Always remember, bringing balance into your composition is the goal of any complex color scheme, while keeping consistency is the goal of any conservative scheme.  Good luck with your remodeling!

The ins and outs of painting masonry – advice from a Northern Virginia contractor.

What exactly does the term ‘masonry’ mean?

Masonry is a building material created from individual units arranged in a line and bound together by mortar, a sticky stone-based adhesive that is applied as a paste and dries as a solid unit.  The units of masonry construction can be bricks, rocks, concrete blocks, or more exotic materials like glass, metal, or tile.  Historically, the development of masonry allowed for a great deal of new versatility in construction, because masonry construction is both a highly durable and a highly flexible building technique.  Brick and stone walls, patios, chimneys, fireplaces, and archways are all examples of common ways that masonry enriches our built environment.

While many people enjoy the natural look of masonry, particularly brick and stone, there are many practical and aesthetic reasons that masonry ought to be coated.

From a practical standpoint, masonry shares the same enemies as just about every building material: moisture and organic decay.  Brick, concrete, and mortar are all vulnerable to physical damage when exposed to moisture, especially if the moisture is subject to temperature changes (such as the typical exterior freeze-thaw cycle in the DC area).  The porosity of these materials also allows them to conduct moisture to even more rot-vulnerable building materials which may lie adjacent to them, like wood and drywall.  Mortar can itself become food for mildew and other organic contaminants if the proper protections are not in place, and the mortar is exposed to sufficient moisture.

From an aesthetic standpoint, while masonry can be quite beautiful on its own, it can be difficult to harmonize with your desired color scheme.  The reds and browns of brick, or the cool grays and blues of stone, may not match the colors you want for your siding and trim, and limiting your choices to those that match the “given colors” of your masonry may constrict your creativity.

For all of these reasons, many people choose to paint their masonry.  Painting a brick or stone exterior wall can look very beautiful, and painting a concrete block basement is essential to protect the masonry (and even the basement!) from water damage.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. The mortar in masonry (as well as the concrete itself, in the case of concrete blocks) contains lime, which is highly alkaline.  It takes the masonry about a year to fully cure; until then, the lime is in the process of reacting with the carbon dioxide in the air.  Painting too soon, or using a type of paint unsuitable for masonry, will cause the paint to deteriorate due to alkaline exposure.  It is ideal to wait at least a month before painting fresh masonry, and to use both a latex masonry primer or other alkali resistant sealer, as well as a layer of 100% acrylic latex masonry paint.  Read the labels; if the product is not specifically engineered for use on masonry, it will not perform up to industry standards.

2. If you are working with a chimney, do not use any sealers that are not vapor permeable on the inside of the chimney.  There are specific products formulated for waterproofing chimneys (which can degrade very quickly with no protection), which are vapor permeable.  Painting the masonry on the fireplace on the interior of a home will not cause the same problems.

Discussion of Painting Rooftops from a Washington, DC Area Contractor

Usually we look at the roof as the aspect of an exterior that we have to work our designs around.  Depending on the type of construction, and whether the building is urban or suburban, roofing is usually constructed of tar, asphalt, or composite shingle.  Usually these materials are neutral in color, with shades ranging from white and gray to red, brown, or black.

Depending on what climate you live in, your rooftops may be darker or lighter.  Dark roofs absorb heat, while light roofs reflect it. When it’s cold out, and you want to maximize your passive solar absorption, the dark roof is an asset.  In the heat of summer, however, or in tropical climates, the extra heat absorbed by a dark roof can cause an extra strain on your energy bill.  You can see local roof styles reflecting the needs of the climates where they’re built: tropical areas tend to have lighter roofs, and cool northern climates tend to have darker roofs.  In general, however, it is easier to get a dark roof than a light roof – and easier to benefit from a light roof than a dark one.  Many of the materials used to produce roofing are dark-colored (especially the tar used in urban roofs), and it costs extra money to get these materials produced in light colors.  Yet many neighborhoods – especially in cities which tend to create vicious heat bubbles in the summer – are realizing the benefits to painting your roof white.  The extra heat gathered by dark roofs in the summer puts a dramatic strain on energy consumption – and a needless one, if you consider that those roofs could just as easily be white.  In fact, there is a nonprofit environmental group dedicated to painting the roofs in New York City white, one by one – claiming that if all of the roofs in the world were painted white, we would save a year’s worth of carbon emissions!  This idea, while it might sound crazy, is actually backed by President Obama’s US Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu.  While there might be aesthetic considerations to painting a sloped roof a really blinding white, says Chu, flat roofs that are not visible from below should all be painted white.

You also may want your roof to be a different color for aesthetic reasons.  Perhaps you want a ‘warm’ composition for your exterior, but the roof shingles you inherited are a cool slate-gray.  Or maybe you want your roof and your shutters to match, or you want to have accents in your siding that match your roofing color, and you just can’t make that work with the color you have up there.  While it isn’t the most frequently used decoration strategy, painting your roof can be done, and it opens the doors to a whole new arena of creativity.  And while the process does involve some degree of technical challenge, it is a good deal cheaper than ordering an all-new roof.  It may also afford your roof some of the added protections that come with coatings, like water resistance, UV resistance, and abrasion resistance.

So, what is involved in painting your roof?  First, it is probably a good idea to consult a professional, even if you intend to ultimately do the job yourself.  You need to accurately identify the substrate you are working with, and the coatings it may have already been treated with, if you are going to pick the right tools and products.  You also need to assess what condition your roof is in.  Prior to coating, most roofs should be power-washed to ensure a clean surface, although a brand new roof without significant damage can probably benefit from a simple once-over with a leaf blower.

Many paint companies – Behr, Sherwin-Williams, and Benjamin Moore, as a few examples – offer paint products specifically intended for rooftops.  These products have primers that are intended to adhere to the unique rooftop surfaces, as well as topcoats designed to weather the accentuated beating that rooftops get from the elements.  A good roof topcoat has to be extra resistant to wind, water, abrasion (from debris), and especially the constantly beating sunlight.

If you are interested in coating your roof for environmental or energy-efficiency purposes, you may consider using a substance that isn’t technically a paint at all, but rather a highly insulate ceramic coating.  The benefit of this substance is that its extra durability and reflectivity really shunt the extra heat away in the summer months, saving your air conditioner (and energy bill) from having to work overtime in the evening when the sun has faded away but a hot roof continues to radiate heat into the household.

So keep your mind open when you are figuring out your exterior design for the upcoming warm season.  You may find an opportunity to exercise your creativity, save on your electricity bill – and help save the earth!