Pitman, NJ

The cottages in the Grove are small, close together, and detailed far beyond their size. Scrollwork, porch brackets, decorative shingle, narrow clapboard, and trim packages that would look at home on a house three times the footprint.

Painting them is almost entirely detail work. There is very little flat wall on a house like this, which means the labor is in edges, and edges are where coatings fail first. Every bracket, spindle, shingle course, and porch element wants individual scraping, sanding, and spot priming.

They are also packed tightly together, which limits how you set up. A cottage in the Grove is a slow, careful, hand-brushed job, and quoting it as a small house because it has small square footage is how a contractor loses money and a homeowner gets a rushed result.

Houses with this much detail were designed to be painted in more than one color, and the detail disappears if it is all done in a single tone.

Body, trim, and accent is the traditional treatment, sometimes with a fourth color on the smallest elements. It takes longer because each color is another cutting-in pass, and it is the entire reason these houses photograph the way they do.

We will work to whatever scheme you want. If you are undecided, Ed will tell you which elements are worth picking out and which ones will just look busy.

Original narrow clapboard, scroll-sawn detail, and shingle from the late 1800s is thin, dry, and has been painted many times.

That changes the approach. Aggressive scraping damages thin old wood. Heavy pressure washing drives water into it and can strip material outright. The right method is gentle: a low-pressure wash, hand scraping of what is genuinely loose, careful sanding, and spot priming, with replacement only where the wood is truly gone.

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

Inside, these cottages have plaster, narrow rooms, low ceilings in places, and often original wood trim and stair parts.

Small rooms are harder than large ones, not easier, because there is more cutting in per square foot and less open wall to make time up on. Plaster is plaster, and it needs repair rather than another coat over a crack that will reopen. See wallpaper removal and wall restoration.

The rest of the borough runs from Victorian singles through early twentieth century homes and into postwar development, which means an ordinary range of jobs alongside the specialty work.

The estimate reflects which house you actually have. A 1955 ranch and an 1890s Grove cottage should not be quoted the same way, and Ed establishes that at the walkthrough.