Interactive Preservation House

Save the expense of major restoration by doing routine paint and woodwork maintenance.

Porches are more exposed to the weather and deterioration so they require extra attention to assure a long sustainable life. They are often character-defining features, providing a comfortable shade and breezes, helping you to get along with your neighbors as they pass by.

Safety check twice a year on railings, stair treads and floor boards. Test the railings for strength to assure they could actually catch and hold up anyone who trips and falls against them. Carefully walk along every stair tread and floor board in bare feet to feel for weak boards. With shoes on bounce lightly from toe to heel to feel if the whole porch shakes, if so an investigation for structural weakness may be needed.

Keep up with routine maintenance of paint and woodwork. This is especially important on porches that are more exposed to the deteriorating effect of the weather. Don’t use salt to melt winter ice, it may deteriorate masonry and rust out the nails that hold the porch stairs and deck together. Use sawdust or sand instead, but sweep sand off as soon as the ice melts, so that foot traffic doesn’t grind it in and wear off the paint and damage the wood.

If major work is needed begin with an overall look at the situation to determine the condition of the porch and how its character relates to the rest of the building, the surrounding landscape, and your needs. Conditions such as peeling paint and misaligned parts provide subtle clues to problems developing beneath the surface. Also keep an eye out for subtle hints of original or early details that are now missing such as paint shadows of an original molding, or old porch parts that were tossed under the porch during past repairs. As you look over your porch keep written notes and sketches.

Learn more in the National Park Service’s Preservation Brief 45: Preserving Historic Wooden Porches.

Spot Paint Maintenance, low cost and effective.

Painting is very sustainable because it uses the least amount of material for the most benefit to give the entire building long-term durability. With all paint work use Lead-Safe methods.

Spot Paint Maintenance. Do a round of spot paint maintenance at least once every two to three years, before the whole place looks shabby and needs a full paint job.

Standard full paint job. Includes removing loose paint, cleaning the surface, applying oil-based alkyd resin primer and two top coats of oil-based alkyd resin or acrylic resin house paint. Don’t do a standard full paint job more often that once every 20 years or you’ll get a heavy paint buildup that traps moisture causing accelerating paint failure.

Complete Paint Removal and recoat. If the paint has built up thicker than a nickel (.035") and you have paint failure the long-term solution may be complete paint removal. This is costly to do, but may reduce costs over the long-term. When done well the paint job cycle can extend out to 10 or 20 years.

Some New paint products cause problems for some old houses. Thick rubbery coatings (sometimes called "elastomerics" in the coatings industry) can trap moisture in exterior woodwork and masonry leading to deterioration. Specific product names cannot be mentioned, for fear of retribution, but you will know these products if the following phrases are used to describe them.

• compares itself to vinyl siding and  contains "PVC vinyl resin" (the paint you want is made from linseed oil, alkyd resin, or acrylic resin)
• "permanent coating" (actually you don’t want permanent, you want a coating that will fail gracefully and be easy to renew, like ordinary house paint)
• "maintenance free" (no such thing, even solid granite needs maintenance)
• "spray on" (hand-brushed paint jobs are more effective)
• "coating with a thickness of about 18 mils, over 15 times thicker than a typical coat of paint" (a good paint job has three coatings with total thickness of 3 to 5 mils and works just fine)
• claims of permeability which allow the coating to 'breathe' (coatings do not breath, but they should be permeable enough to let water vapor pass easily pass through, no house coating that is 18 mils thick is going to be more permeable than one that is only 3 to 5 mils thick)

The marketers and installers of these products suggest they can keep all the water out of the walls, but that is an impossibility with older houses. An effective paint coating will be thin enough to allow water vapor to escape from the wall directly through the paint fill. If too much water builds up due to a leak the paint will fail right at the location of the water problem by peeling down to bare wood. This is a good thing that you want to happen. The peeling paint makes it easy for you to spot the water problem and fix it before it rots out the wall causing expensive repairs. A coating that is so thick and strong that it does not fail can trap water and hide problems in the wall leading to deterioration and costly repairs.