Stop, Look, A Lesson - Part 2

Peeling paint job

When I hung up the phone I contemplated one spot which had given us trouble while painting. It was a knot that was bleeding sap that we thought we had finally sealed using pigmented shellac. Keith and I were building a house together at this time so I went to him and told him what Mrs. H had said about paint peeling in several places. We agreed to get up there and take a look at it as soon as we could.

When we saw what was truly going on at Mrs. H’s home we were dumbstruck. The knot I had worried about was not even among the problem spots. The paint was in the beginning stages of failure in quite a few places. My heart sank as I asked myself “what did we do wrong?”

We considered the power washing we had given the house about a week before painting. Was it possible the trim had not fully dried? Before buying the paint I had asked Steve at Duron what primer he suggested for use under oil and he suggested the latex variety of Terminator. Was this somehow a bad combination? Neither of these explanations seemed plausible. The week between the power wash and paint had been dry and I had never known Steve to give bad advice on paint. We had to take our search for the truth deeper. We began to closely examine the structure.

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The devil in the details

The windows were trimmed using 5/4 by 4 cedar boards with a 5/4 cedar arch detail at the top of the windows. These had been cut from 12 inch stock and rose to 11 inches or so at the highest point of the arch. This was an unusual detail which presented a hurdle for the siding crew. Regular J channel would not work here as it was not flexible enough so they had attempted to solve the problem by using flexible J. This probably would have worked fine, flexible J is often used over arch top windows, but the flexible J had been cut too short for the application. Instead of allowing the window to shed water this system was channeling the water directly behind the siding. The pattern of paint failure was starting to make perfect sense. The paint was failing where the water was breeching the siding. The wooden trim was getting wet from behind making proper adhesion of the paint impossible. Of course I was relieved to learn that nothing we had done had caused the paint to fail but it was a reluctant relief; we had suddenly discovered a much larger problem.
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