Exterior Painting on San Juan Island

Paint out here has a harder job than paint on the mainland. Salt carries inland on a southwesterly and settles on everything, so a surface that looks clean is often not. Winter rain arrives sideways, which means it hits vertical surfaces the way it never does inland. And then the summer sun on a south or west elevation with water reflecting back up at it will chalk a topcoat years before the north side shows anything at all. Almost every island repaint I look at is really two different jobs: two elevations that are failing and two that are fine.

The window is the other island-specific constraint, and it is genuinely narrow. Friday Harbor sits in the rain shadow of the Olympics and Vancouver Island, which is why we get dry summers and roughly half the rainfall of Seattle. That helps. But the useful painting season is still about May through mid-September, and July and August are the only two months you can count on. Most coatings want surface temperatures above the mid-fifties and dropping, not rising, humidity, plus dry wood underneath. I book exterior painting from the winter, and by June the good weeks are usually gone.

Prep is where the job is won. I wash first — soft washing, low pressure and a cleaning solution, never a pressure wand on painted cedar, because pressure drives water behind the siding and strips more coating than it cleans. Then scrape and sand the failing areas back to a sound edge, feather the transitions so you cannot read them from the yard, spot prime every bare spot, and caulk the joints that actually need caulk. Not every joint does. Sealing the bottom edge of a lap board or the underside of a shingle butt traps water in the wall, and I leave those to drain the way they were designed to.

Cedar needs one extra step that gets skipped constantly. Cedar contains water-soluble tannins that bleed straight through latex, and on bare or freshly exposed cedar you will get brown streaking within a season unless you use a stain-blocking primer. On a house that has already bled through, the old topcoat has to be washed and sealed before the new coat goes on, or you just paint over the problem and watch it come back. Knots and cut ends are the worst offenders.

Second homes have their own pattern. A house occupied three weeks a year goes eight or ten years between coats instead of six, and the failure is not evenly spread — it is concentrated on the water-facing elevations and the trim, especially horizontal trim, sills, and railings, which hold water. On those houses I will often recommend doing the two bad elevations and all the trim now, and the other two elevations in a later season. It is a smaller number and it is the right call, and I would rather say that than sell you a whole-house repaint you do not need yet.

A note on sheen and color that is specific to this light. West-facing walls here get direct evening sun plus reflected glare off the water, and a deep or saturated color on that elevation will fade visibly faster than the same color on the north side. Higher-sheen finishes shed dirt and salt better and clean off more easily, which is worth having on trim, sills, and anything at hand height, but they also show every ripple in old cedar. Flat or low-sheen on the body and a satin or semi-gloss on the trim is the combination that holds up and still looks right on a shingled island house. If you are choosing a color from a chip indoors, put a sample board up on the actual wall for a day first, because the light here will change it.

I paint the exterior of the building and its trim, doors, and outbuildings. I do not do lead abatement. Houses built before 1978 can have lead paint, and if testing suggests it, disturbing that coating is certified work and it goes to a certified firm. I will tell you plainly if your house is in that category rather than sanding first and mentioning it later.