House Painters in Levittown, PA

The Levittowner, the Rancher, the Jubilee, the Pennsylvanian, the Colonial, and the Country Clubber. Once you have prepped a few of each, you know the house before you walk in it.

You know where the siding meets the grade, where the fascia sits behind the gutter, which elevation takes the afternoon sun, and which trim detail is going to be soft. That means an estimate here is more accurate than in a neighborhood of one-off houses, and it means we are not discovering problems halfway through that should have been priced up front.

The complication is that very few of these houses are still original. Most have been added onto, re-sided, converted from carport to garage, or had the kitchen pushed out at some point. The original shell behaves predictably. The additions are where you find whatever the previous owner's contractor did.

The original Levitt houses were built on concrete slabs with radiant heating coils in them, and no basements. That is worth knowing before anyone paints an interior wall down low.

Where the original radiant system has leaked, or where the slab wicks moisture at the perimeter, you get damp at the bottom of walls, failing paint along the baseline, and sometimes efflorescence on masonry. A coat of paint over that is temporary by definition.

We check the bottom of the wall on these houses as a matter of course, and if there is a moisture problem Ed will say so rather than coat it and let you find out next winter.

A large share of these homes have been re-sided at least once, usually in aluminum or vinyl.

Aluminum chalks heavily with age, and it has to be washed until the chalk is gone and primed with a bonding primer, otherwise the new coat is bonded to powder. Vinyl can be painted with vinyl-safe products, but only in a color no darker than the original, because a darker panel absorbs more heat and warps. We will turn down a color rather than watch a wall buckle.

Original wood and composite siding still exists on plenty of houses here and is straightforward to work with, provided the loose material is scraped and the bare spots are spot primed. More on all three on the exterior painting page.

The original interiors are drywall, not plaster, which makes them simpler than a Philadelphia rowhome. The repairs are ordinary: nail pops, corner bead damage, settlement cracking at the openings.

What is not ordinary is the seam between the original house and an addition. Different framing, different ages, different movement rates, and a joint that opens up seasonally. Filling it with compound gets you a crack again by February. It needs to be handled as a control joint or bridged properly, and we will tell you which it needs.