Bristol, PA

A house on Radcliffe or in the historic district may carry a dozen coatings applied over two centuries. Under whatever is on it now there is oil-based enamel, and under that there is lead-era paint, and under that there may be something older still.

You cannot approach that like a twenty year old exterior. Loose and failing material has to come off. Sound material can often stay and be sanded and primed. The judgment call is where one becomes the other, and getting it wrong in either direction is expensive: strip everything and you have tripled the job, strip nothing and the new finish comes off with the old.

Every one of these buildings predates 1978 by a wide margin, so lead-safe work practices apply as a matter of course.

Bristol sits on the Delaware, and buildings near a river hold more moisture than buildings that do not. Higher ambient humidity, slower drying after rain, and in the low-lying parts of the borough a history of flood exposure in some structures.

That affects timing more than product. Exteriors here need real dry time after washing and after rain, and pushing a coating onto a damp substrate to keep a schedule is how you generate a callback. It also means the shaded and river-facing elevations are the ones that grow mildew and need mildew-resistant finishes.

Interiors in the historic district are plaster, often over hand-split lath, and often patched by many hands over many decades.

Some of it is beautiful and worth preserving. Some of it has separated from the lath entirely and moves under pressure. We repair rather than replace wherever the plaster is sound enough to justify it, because a plaster wall properly repaired and skimmed reads better in an old house than a drywall wall ever will. See wallpaper removal and wall restoration for how that work runs.

If a property sits in a historic district, exterior changes including color may be subject to review, and that is worth confirming with the borough before work starts rather than after.

We are painters, not a historic commission, so we do not advise on approvals. What we do is deliver work that suits the building: brushed finishes where a sprayed one would look wrong, appropriate sheen on old trim, and clean lines on detail that was designed to be picked out.