How to Paint a Historic Home

04 Jun How to Paint a Historic Home

The beauty of historical homes is undeniable, capturing an era of craftsmanship only available at a custom level today. As a result, caring for a home with history requires additional effort, which many homeowners and historical societies are more than willing to do to maintain the building’s historical value and unmatched character. That’s why step one is to partner with a professional when it comes to how to paint a historic house.

Here’s a peek inside our seven-step approach to give you an idea of the process in painting a historical home.

1. Inspect Your Historic Home

With its decades—or centuries—of history, your home likely shows signs of age. One of the most frequent issues is wood rot, a natural, organic process that spreads at a rapid rate when left untreated. A few types of wood rot are found in homes and include soft, wet, and dry rot, with dry rot being the most severe and wet rot the most common.

In historical homes, your trim, windows and doors are often the most susceptible to wood rot because they’re usually without the appropriate protections, which leads to damage from moisture and fungi. That’s why our team focuses on inspecting those areas when looking into renovating and painting your historic home. If we do find wood rot, we show you, so you know what to look for in the future.

2. Determine Your Historic Home’s Era-Specific Materials and Building Principles

Checking for wood rot is an essential step in how to paint a historic house because if you have to replace your trim — and paint that trim — it’s best to do it when you’re already planning to re-paint your home. Acquiring new trim for your windows, doors, columns and other features of your home’s exterior is not as simple as it is for modern homes. Today, it’s unheard of for companies to manufacture trim pieces in bulk that match the sizes common to 20th-, 19th- and even 18th-century structures.

That’s why custom fabrication is a necessity for historic homes, and also why it’s critical to choose a provider that’s familiar with caring for homes with history. Many will overlook that aspect of trim sizes and deliver lumber sizes that take away the history of your house and leave a result that’s far from satisfactory. With our approach, we look at the building principles and materials that define your home and its era, as well as that period’s color schemes.

3. Fabricate Your Historic Home’s Replacement Exterior Pieces

It’s a labor of love to restore historic homes to their former glory, often requiring the fabrication of custom exterior pieces to replace original ones affected by wood rot. For us, it’s incredibly satisfying, which is why you want to partner with a company that shares your love of history and understands your house is more than a place to eat and sleep — it’s an heirloom of your community.

For our historic home restorations in Kansas City, MO, we custom fabricate all the necessary trims. We’ve done this for several historic homes and locations, including the Rice-Tremonti House. Based on our experiences, as well as our clients’ experiences with other painting companies, we recommend dedicating a fair amount of time to researching the architectural history of an era. It’ll give you an understanding of the necessary measurements and craftsmanship behind making those exterior pieces.

4. Clean and Prepare Your Historic Home’s Surface

What comes after all that prep work for painting and restoring a historic home? A few more preparations. In our process, we clean your home’s exterior from top to bottom, removing chipped paint, re-glazing windowpanes and more. Because of the delicate nature of historical homes, we take off your home’s paint through hand-scraping, which is more labor-intensive but protects your home from damage — and that’s our priority.

5. Install Your Historic Home’s Custom-Fabricated Pieces

After cleaning and preparing the surface of your historic home, as well as fabricating your custom trims, we undertake the task of removing and replacing your exterior pieces. Our team completes every replacement with care, ensuring the integrity of your building from start to finish. We also make sure to leave your property neat and tidy, free of all our materials, hardware and tools.

6. Review Your Historic Home’s Prepared Surface

We follow a much different process when it comes to painting homes, whether they’re modern or historical. While many companies will prep, paint and leave, we prepare your home for painting and then give you the chance to look it over, so this is a step you may not see offered by businesses in your local area if you’re outside your home of Kansas City, MO.

If you like what you see, our team will go ahead with painting your home — but if you have questions or requests, we will help you without delay.

7. Paint Your Historic Home

Only after you give us the thumbs-up does our team go ahead with painting your historic home in a palette that reflects its period and meets your approval. If you’ve ever passed through the Brookside neighborhood in Missouri, we’ve restored and painted many of the homes in that area, which can give you an idea of the quality and commitment we put into our historic home paintings for the Kansas City, MO, community.

All our exterior services include a five-year warranty.

Get Expert Guidance From Neighborhood Painting

At Neighborhood Painting, we’re a leading painter for historic homes in Kansas City, MO. We know the process inside and out, forward and backward, delivering a restoration and paint job that captures the history of your home’s era — which is why many homeowners choose to trust us when it comes to caring for their home. When you’re looking for historic home painting and restoration in the Kansas City area, look no further than our full-time team.

Bring the history of your home to the forefront of its design by contacting us today at 913-709-6151 for a free estimate!