For a painting contractor specializing in historic restoration, the most important part of a paint job often happens long before the first finish coat is ever applied. On a modern building, painting can be fairly straightforward: clean the surface, make the necessary repairs, prime where needed and apply the coating. But, a historic building is different.
Most of the homes we work on are still largely original wood. They can hold generations of paint, repairs from different periods, unfamiliar coatings, delicate architectural details, and areas that have been protected from direct exposure for a century.
The objective is to preserve what is sound, carefully remove what has failed, protect the historic material underneath and create a coating system capable of carrying the building through the next chapter of its life. That is the philosophy guiding our current restoration work at Jacksonville’s historic Martha Washington.
The Martha Washington began as one of the grand residences of Jacksonville’s Riverside neighborhood. Built in 1911 for lumberman Bryan W. Blount, the three-story Colonial Revival mansion was one of the largest houses in what was then known as Riverside Annex. Its most recognizable architectural features include its enormous Doric columns, deep veranda, and prominent dormers.
In 1938, a large addition was built and the property became the Martha Washington Hotel, originally conceived as a hotel for women. During World War II, it housed servicemen and their families. In later decades it functioned more as a residential hotel and boarding house. By 1977, the building had closed and was scheduled for demolition. Demolition had actually begun when preservationists intervened. Riverside Avondale Preservation, then still a young organization, helped organize the effort that saved the building. It was subsequently converted into condominiums.
The fact that the Martha Washington still stands today is the result of people deciding that an old building was worth the extra effort to save. In many ways, that is the same philosophy we bring to painting these places.
Preparation usually begins with cleaning, and on a large exterior that often means pressure washing. But one of the biggest misconceptions about pressure washing an old house is that the goal is to blast off old paint. It isn’t. The main purpose is to remove dirt, mildew, biological growth, and other surface contaminants so the underlying coating can be properly evaluated and prepared. Hard blasting with a pressure washer can do more harm than good.
That is why most of the failed coatings on the historic buildings we restore are removed by hand. Specialty surfacing tools can be useful around moldings and contours, but one of the most important skills is knowing when to stop.
On a 100-year-old house, we are not trying to strip every surface down to bare wood by default. There may be layers of paint that have remained firmly bonded for decades. If a coating is sound, cannot be lifted with a scraper, and is providing a stable substrate, removing it just to reach bare wood can create more problems than it solves.
When we give a homeowner a timeline for their project they might say, “But, the last company painted our house in two weeks.”
Properly preparation sometimes takes weeks of cleaning, scraping, sanding, repairing, spot priming, and carefully applying each coat. It takes longer, but a good job done right will show up years later. Our goal is not to win a race to the final coat. It is to avoid having the owner repeat the process prematurely.
Ideally, our relationship with you does not end when the we leave your home at the end of the job. Annual washing and periodic inspections can catch small coating failures before they become big carpentry problems. Small failures addressed early are inexpensive. Left alone, they can grow, allow moisture behind paint, and lead to rot. At Oasis we are here for the long run.
Oasis Painting | 863-517-1891
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