House Painters in Drexel Hill, PA

The classic Drexel Hill house is a stone twin, and stone is masonry, which means it has to be able to dry. Painting a stone front with a standard exterior product traps moisture behind the coating and lifts it, usually starting at the base of the wall where water sits longest.

Where a stone front stays unpainted, which is the better outcome, the work is in the trim, the porch, the windows, and the pointing. Where a previous owner already painted it, we deal with what is there, which sometimes means stripping failed coating before anything new goes on.

The front porch is the signature detail on these houses and it is also the most exposed part of them. Columns, railings, ceiling boards, brackets, and the porch floor all take weather from below as well as above.

Porch ceilings are where we find the most hidden rot, because water gets in behind a gutter or a roof edge and works into the boards where nobody looks. Cutting that out and rebuilding it before painting is part of the job. See cabinet painting and wood finishing for how we handle wood rot and carpentry repair.

The interiors in these neighborhoods are plaster, and they are old enough to have been papered at least once. A lot of our Drexel Hill work starts as a painting call and turns into wallpaper removal and wall restoration once we see what is under the current finish.

The other common find is trim that has been painted over oil-based enamel several times. That needs sanding, degreasing, and a bonding primer before a waterborne finish will hold, and skipping it is why repainted trim in these houses ends up soft or peeling in strips.

A twin shares a wall, and shared walls behave like party walls in the city. They dry slowly, they hold damp, and the plaster on them tends to fail before the plaster on the exposed walls does.

If one wall in a room looks worse than the other three, that is usually why. We treat it as a repair job rather than covering it, because a fresh coat over soft plaster is a temporary result.