I hope to add more photos as sping unfolds. Pictures are fun though, and they get across the scope and scale of the projects we undertake better than any marketing drivel I could write about our work. Take a look!

Here's a link to an MPR news article about the new law, which is alternately panicked and reassuring, which pretty much sums up how I feel about it. Many contractors will not be affected by the new regulations, such as anyone who is in new construction and people who primarily work on newer homes. We almost exclusively work on residential repaints (as painting your existing house is called in the trades) on buildings build long before 1978. This sentence from the MPR article kind of chills me:

"Murphy says it'll also be tough to compete with builders who don't comply with the law, because they'll be able to undercut law-abiding builders on price."

The lead abatement techniques required by the new law are not labyrithine or unreasonable, but they do add a certain amount of administrative overhead - documentation is required now - and more time to set up and clean up. Time is money, and a firm that chooses to ignore the law and the safety standards will probably be able to underbid one that obeys the law. So, please, ask if the painters you hire are compliant. Pretty pretty please.

Unsurprisingly, most exposures to VOCs take place in short concentrated durations, such as when you paint a room. TigerOx Painting uses primarily Sherwin Williams, Hirshfield's, and Benjamin Moore paints, and both of those companies have a variety of paints that have either low- or no- VOCs. We have had good luck with SWP's "Duration Home" and "ProGreen" as well as Benjamin Moore's "Aura" and Hirshfield's "BEN". All of these are low-VOC paints. Although we haven't had a chance to paint with this yet, Benjamin Moore has a new paint called "Natura" which has no-VOCs. Another no-VOC paint is SWP's "Harmony".

In general these paints are not cheap: $30-$50 a gallon for us to buy, and that's with our contractor's discount. Paint costs have been rising across the board, partially because paint is a petroleum product, and you know how gas prices are, and partially because the US is in a resource competition with China and other industrializing nations for the metals and pigments that give paint its color. (You'll notice that deep-based paints cost more than white; color costs.) Manufacturing paints to be low- and no-VOC adds another price factor. I'm not saying they aren't worth the price. "Aura" has excellent coverage, so with a dark color, you will use less paint. "BEN" and "ProGreen" are both low-VOC, and are less expensive than some of the other paints mentioned. The upshot is that there are a variety of products to choose from to help minimize your exposure to indoor pollutants, and at a variety of prices.

Every city has its own unique architectural flavor, and Healy's houses, well over a hundred in all, are a large influence on the evolving notion of a typical Minneapolis house. We've been lucky enough to work on few, and have been happy to lend our craft towards preserving and maintaining a Minneapolis architectural legacy. More articles about the Healy houses in the Wedge are forthcoming.

Article available here.

Below is a photo of the house discussed in the article.

But new laws have recently been enacted concerning lead safety in renovations! The EPA now requires that the pamphlet, Renovate Right: Important Lead Hazard Information for Families, Child Care Providers and Schools, be given to homeowners in any renovation that affects more than a 2 x 2 foot square area of paint on a structure built before 1978. (Click title for link.) The previous government pamphlet more or less said "don't do any painting ever," which is not helpful. The new pamphlet is so much better, because it explains how to go about painting safely. There are now certified classes in lead abatement, and a certification process for contractors. TigerOx Painting could not be more excited about this; our days of mumbling and gesturing inarticulately are over. (Well, okay, those days are never over, but they are when it comes to lead.) Jeremy and Anders have both taken the new lead certification course, and our Lead-Safe Certification is now pending. We hope to write a couple more blog posts about the new safety standards. Stay tuned!

More information about lead can be found at www.epa.gov/lead.

Find our page here.

Become a fan today!

Article here.

 However, there are several modern, latex paints that have been formulated with stucco in mind, and they work beautifully. Painting stucco can cover the patches that have been made, erase the seams between an addition and the original structure, and brighten the sometimes depressing greyness of untinted stucco. This brings me to another thing: although not always true, sometimes the original stucco can be historically important (I'm thinking here of the interesting sand textures and tinting on a Percell & Emsley house here in Minneapolis) and painting over this is a crime. An architectural crime! Don't be a perpetrator.

Painting stucco is, in some ways, easier than painting wooden siding. The first step is to get the stucco clean.  This is best done with a pressure washer.  The next step is to remove any loose paint, if the stucco has been previously painted.  The pressure washing should remove most of the loose paint, but it may be necessary to scrape or wire brush some spots.  Now is the time to fix any spots where the stucco has fallen out.   Once any patching has been done and is dry, it’s time to prime.  Stucco and wood are different surfaces, so a traditional wood primer may not be appropriate for priming stucco.  Check the can’s label or ask your paint store sales rep to make sure.  Sherwin-Williams sells a product called Loxon XP which acts as both a quality stucco primer and top-coat.  After priming, caulk any cracks and apply the finish coat.  If the stucco has been properly primed, any high quality latex finish paint can be used for the final coat.

1. Consider using warm colors.

Popular wisdom says stay with a warm color, like yellows, reds, oranges, tans, purples, etc. I like this idea because I think it’s ok to feel enveloped in your bedroom, like it’s a warm and cozy place. I also like picking a color from a favorite rug or bedspread, even if it’s the smallest thread. Let’s say you are not fond of the warm color palate, that’s fine, just pick something cheerful. You do not want a blue gray that will bum you out everyday. Go for a white based blue that has some spunk. And let’s just say you have lots of red accents in your room and you want gray walls, that can look pretty sharp.

2. Samples are key.

I think if you go with a yellow or red, you should do samples and keep in mind that you will be dealing with multiple coats. I just painted a bedroom a lovely pale yellow and it took five coats with a primer to achieve the color. Another consideration for coverage is flat paint covers better than eggshell, satin and semi-gloss. You can discover how well the color covers with a sample board. Most paint stores have cheaper versions of sample quarts, and they are worth the money. It is not always easy to see how a color will look from a tiny sample. And some colors writ large will just vibrate, which might be too much for you to fall asleep in.

3. Don't worry about what other people think.

Dining rooms and living rooms are designed to be public spaces; bedrooms are not. Once past the teenage years of sulking in the bedroom, very few people allow anyone but the most intimate friends into their bedrooms. Don't worry aboutwhat other people will think of the coral you love, or the Danish blue, or the aubergine.  It is your space, the theatre of your dreams. You choose the set colors.

Doors:

I've been trying to come up with a pithy aphorism about eyes being the windows of the soul, but the front door is the soul of the home, but as you see from my example, it's not really working out. But there is an proverb in there somewhere, because the front door is so absolutely vital to the look of your home, it's character and sense of invitation. While not always true, often builders orient the front door so that it is the focal point. (Occasionally builders get excited about columns or shutters, and bury the door, which has always struck me as a little odd.) The front door is the portal to the home, the threshold to the private sphere. Not to get too overblown about this, but the ancient Celts used to set impediments in the doorway, such as a beam or a stone, as a subtle reminder to be mindful of the movement between the worlds. Tibetans pound bits of metal into thresholds, for similar purposes, to affix the way in and out.

My remarks are intended to apply to doors that are to be painted. If you have a natural door, it's usually best to leave it natural, if it is in any kind of salvageable condition. If you are unsure about what color the front door should be, then go outside, cross the street, and take a good hard look. This color should probably not be any of the other accent colors; a front door should be unique. I tend to argue against light-colored doors, but my grandmother and I always disagreed about this. She would say that a white door looked clean; I believe a white door is almost instantly smudged and scuffed, and therefore looks and is dirty. I, personally, find reds and purples to be really wonderful door colors, because they have such a warmth and life to them. Now, I don't just mean Viking purple and Fire Engine red, I mean the whole gamut from soft, warm, almost brown reads, to purples that are just this side of black. The color need not be an aggressive color, but an undercurrent of the emotions suggested by red and purple can really create vivid entrance.

Windows:

First, a note on windows. There tend to be at least two different kinds of window on a Minneapolis or a St Paul house: storm windows and sash windows. Storm windows tend to be affixed on the outside, are a single pane of glass, and are there for the noble purpose of reducing your heating and cooling costs. The air between the storm and the inner windows acts as an insulator. Storm windows, in turn, tend to break into two different kinds: the traditional kind, which much be changed with the seasons, as there is both a storm window and a storm screen, and the combination storm, a modern invention that has sliding panes of glass and screens and do not need to be changed with the season. Combination storms can come in all variety of materials: wood, vinyl and aluminum.

Underneath these windows tend to lurk the double hung sash window, with a lower pane that slides up and an upper pane that (theoretically) slides down. There are also casements, crank-outs, pull-ins, and a variety of other, newer windows that tend to be fitted with thermal glasses and have no storms. Even houses that have had all the old storms removed and replaced with combination storms tend to have at least a couple of the traditional storms on oddly shaped or otherwise stationary windows, usually the ones that never open: the big front window, stained glass, piano windows, or the pair that sometimes flank the chimney. I wanted to make a note on definitions, as we, as professionals, often get into semi-comical conversations about their windows, as the specific terminology isn't always known to the homeowner.

Windows are tricky, because they are almost always a mix of styles and materials: the lower windows redone in the 20s, the upper windows in the 70s; some have wooden storms, some vinyl, some aluminum. Windows that used to have storms and screens that hung into place but have been fitted with modern combination storms, often still have the hanging hardware in place. For crying out loud, have these removed! This has nothing to do with color selection, but it makes me so crazy I feel obliged to repeat it at every opportunity.

Windows read as black from the outside, which may strike you as strange, but it's true. Because of this, we often recommend that sash windows be painted with a color other than white, so that the pane divisions don't appear distracting. The same holds true for storm windows, especially if they are fit inside a light or white trim. Traditionally, storms were painted black or dark green (especially a color called “Black Forest Green” that can be found in the Benjamin Moore color charts.) You generally can't go wrong with this. Exterior color choice is by nature conservative, and the traditions are tried and true. We have also had good results with other dark, rich colors, such as reddish-browns, bronzes, and almost purple charcoals. I also once painted the storms in a porch an aluminum silver, and it was brilliantly cool. The storms on the body of the house were dark green though.

This brings me to another thing: because of the mixture of different kinds of materials on a home, some times people feel trapped into matching all the storms to the white vinyl storms, or whatever material will not be painted. While it's certainly a valid choice to make all the storms the same color, by all means, feel like you have permission to paint all the wooden storms one way, and leave the vinyl white. I have white vinyl storms on most of my house, but I recently replaced the storm over the picture window, because it had been installed broken. I went with a wooden storm, and I intend to paint it a dark green. Most of the time, the visual context for the window is for people standing on the front porch. It really doesn't matter that it won't match the windows on the second story, because they aren't seen together much anyway. Moreover, white would look incongruous with other Victorian colors on the porch. Porch windows are in a different context than third story storms, and it's okay to tailor your color choices to specific parts and usages of the house.

I found my trim color on a stucco Arts and Crafts house in St Paul. My own home is a Queen Anne with wooden siding, but the stucco and clapboard on the other house have roughly the same color tones. It's a deep brown with overtones of purple and red, and tends to change in the light. I love it. I haven't quite worked out what color I'm going to use on the gables, but that's another point: not all decisions have to be made together.

Some decisions are easy. I worked with a woman who knew right away the color of her shutters, and the rest of the color choices were made around that. This is somewhat unusual, because usually people know their body and trim colors first, and then agonize over the accent colors. I once repainted a sample bracket no less than six different times, until the homeowner found the accent color she was happy with. You may think I'm straining to make jokes at her expense, but I'm not. Keep looking until you find your color. Better to paint the one bracket six times than all the brackets twice.

Back to my original point: drive around your neighborhood and look at all the color choices your neighbors have made. Neighborhoods have characters just as surely as individual homes do. While you are welcome to scoff at the Joneses, the homes in your neighborhood are most likely built in the same era, lived in by people demographically similar to you, and possibly even built by the same builders. Houses in Powderhorn tend toward dramatic colors and riotous urban gardens. The sweet little prairie school house we painted a color the homeowner referred to as “Push-up orange”, after the frozen treat, worked beautifully in that neighborhood. The scale of the house is small, so brighter colors pop without becoming overwhelming, and the neighboring houses were mix of varying colors and styles. It's one of my favorite color choices.

If you find a house you like, get out of your car, walk up to the house, and ring the doorbell. You may feel stupid and weird, but ask the homeowners what colors they used. I have done this in the service of color selection for clients, and people are almost always friendly, flattered, and happy to drag you down in to the basement to look at their paint cans. If you can't stand the thought of talking to strangers, at the very least walk up to the house with a fan-deck and try to find the color in that deck that most closely matches the colors on the house.

Do not do this from a distance. I can't emphasize this enough. One of the reasons it is so hard to choose exterior colors is that there is something about the intensity of sunlight, living things and open skies that makes colors misleading. Exterior colors are almost always darker, more intense, or more complicated than they look at first glance. I was incredibly surprised when I matched the body color of my house to a sample chip, and then brought that color inside. I would have said, with credible certainty, that the color was a light cream. Not so, not even close. It's a deep cream, with overtones of umber and apricot.

As another thought experiment, bring inside a collection of leaves from outside. Try to get a variety, from spring greens to dark leaves. Consider how variable and unreal they look inside your home. This is the summer landscape your house will be seen against, the context for your colors. Go look at your roof, your sidewalk, and the houses next door. I talked in my last post about how environment should affect your choices; this is an extension of that. Your environment is also made up of people making their own, personal color choices, and your house is situated in a community. This is why choosing colors is so terrifying, and so darn fun.

We once painted for a lovely woman of Greek extraction. She related how she had gone to Greece, and come home in love with the Mediterranean colors: white-wash and terracotta, azure blues and olive greens. She painted these colors all over her home, and was happy with them until the Minnesota winter set in. Suddenly the colors that had been happily breezy and cooling were unhappily breezy and cooling. Her home seemed cold and uninviting six months out of the year. Which brings to me to maybe my only rule: Always consider what your colors will look like in the snow and cold.

As a corollary to this “rule”, while grays and whites certainly have a place in an exterior color palette in Minnesota, they have to be chosen cautiously. A cold white as a body color will blend with the snow in a discouraging manner. Grays can suggest slush and ice on drizzling, horrible days in February. On the other end of the spectrum, clear, bright, tropical colors can become garish and ridiculous when popping out of a mountain of snow. Think of the Miami Vice house on Lake of the Isles. If you don't know what I mean, then take a drive around the lake, and you'll see it. The same things that look good in Florida or Greece don't look good in the Upper Midwest. The plants, sky, water, and even the color of the soil are completely different.

For example, if you have a mock Tudor, you probably shouldn't paint your half-timbers on the front with anything other than a couple varieties of brown, because it's weird and anachronistic to see them any other color, such as a pinkish salmon we once had the pleasure to paint over. You may have some more leeway in choosing a stucco color on a Tudor, anything from creams to tans and taupes, but none of these should be so dark as to interfere with the effect of the architectural details. The beams in the front are an visual asset to be emphasized; contrasting colors displays them well.

“But what style is my house in?” you ask, “I can't tell.” Well, this is where things get interesting. Many, many houses are built in what's clumsily called 20^th Century Vernacular. This means that the builders cribbed elements from several different school and styles, mixing the Federalist with Arts and Crafts, tossing in some columns and happily moving in to raise a family. Occasionally you'll find a house that started out as one thing, and then was remodeled so extensively as to have changed the original style into something else entirely. Like all construction projects, this can be done well, or it can be done badly.

If your house is in a collection of styles, you certainly have more options in your color choices, as you can mix styles in the manner of the original builders. Or you can choose the dominant style, and go with that. Many paint manufacturers (most notably Sherwin Williams, Benjamin Moore, and Hirshfield's) have created paint lines attuned to specific architectural styles. If you have an Art and Crafts inflected house, start with the colors that have been identified as such. Choice is often a matter of limiting your options. Style is as good a place to start as any.

And finally, a note on materials. Do you have brick or stone sections you will not be painting? White metal fascia, vinyl-covered dormers or aluminum storms that would be troublesome to paint, if not downright expensive? (An aside on painting vinyl: it used to be that you couldn't paint vinyl with a color darker than the factory finish, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. Paint manufacturers, in their ongoing arms race with the vinyl people, have now formulated paints that claim to do exactly that.) Colors can be suggested by stone and brick, which often have a lovely range of shades and patterns. Don't forget to look at the mortar! If there are parts of the house you're not painting, then you already have some choices made.

Exterior color palettes, by contrast, are notoriously tricky. Even the smallest house is large, it is visible to everyone, and the consequences of bad choices tend to linger. It is simply too expensive and time-consuming to repaint, in most cases. Little wonder, then, that there are very few professional colorists who even do exterior palettes, given how high the stakes are, and how little training there is in the matter. Homeowners are often left with these hard decisions with little guidance, or the dubious advice of a person I like to refer to as “the artistic friend”. The artistic friend (or relative) is almost always well meaning, but often simply reiterates a collection of inflexible “rules” he or she has either acquired or made up over the years. Never use black! Always use black! Never use more than two colors! Always use more than two colors! It's enough to make your head spin.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, there are few, if any, hard and fast rules when choosing colors for the exterior of your home. I offer instead a series of questions and concerns that you might like to consider while making these choices, and with any luck, you'll find the palette that works for you. TigerOx Painting works in the Twin Cities metro, so my comments toward choosing colors are geared toward that location.

Double-hung sash windows are held in place on the inside with window stops. If the stops are secured by screws and finish washers, remove the screws to take out the stops. If the stops have been painted in, they need to be cut free with a utility knife. If they are secured by nails, the stops need to be gently pried free, taking care not to damage the stop. Finish nails should be pulled through with a pliers rather than pounded back.

Once the stops have been removed, the lower sash window should be free to be taken out. If one rope is still attached to the window, it is usually held in place with a nail through a knot. This is easily pulled out.

In the lower part of the window channel, there is an opening to the weight chamber that is usually accessed by removing a screw. The weight can be pulled out of the chamber, and will most likely have the end of the broken rope still attached to it. Before you remove the rope, note how the knot is tied. You can use this knot as your guide in tying a new knot.

Make sure you use the appropriate size sash cord. Do not use nylon rope, as it will stretch, and the counter-weighs won't work anymore. Feed the rope through the pulley at the top of the channel. Use a coat hanger if necessary to help you fish the line through the weight door. Tie the rope to the weight and return it to the chamber. The knot needs to be one that tightens when it pulls, such as bowline knot.

Raise the weight to its highest point and the window to its lowest point to determine the correct length for the cord. Make sure there is enough length for tying a knot at the end of the rope. The knot goes into the hole that is one third from the top of the sash. Secure it in place with a short nail. Replace the window stop.

If the window has old style interlocking weatherstripping, the process is more complicated. Weatherstripping can be difficult to remove without damaging it; be careful and gentle. Resist the temptation to tear it out and not reinstall. That weatherstripping is saving you heating and cooling dollars.

Many people are unaware that their upper sash windows are designed to be moved. In working order, the upper and lower sashes can reverse positions: the upper one down and the lower one up. In the days of large, window-sized screens, the upper and lower sashes could both be opened, to create a cross current. Modern combinations are glass at the top, and the reasons for lowing the upper sash have dwindled. It is a rare house, however, where you can find the upper sash not frozen in place by paint, age, coal dust, and broken ropes.

To repair a rope on the upper sash, it is necessary to remove the parting stop, which is a rectangular molding between the upper and lower sash. Like weatherstripping, this parting stop is often both fragile and difficult to remove. I should probably note that one can only access the parting stop and the upper sash when the lower sash has been removed. The process of replacing the rope on the upper sash is the same as for the lower sash.

While you have the sash windows open, this would be a perfect time to clean out the channels and scrape out accumulated paint. Before the sash windows are put back in place, they can be rubbed with a beeswax candle to aid in the free movement for the window. Things that work make your life work.

This kills me. There can be good reasons to replace sash windows in a home (although I would argue that you'd probably get better results, in terms of energy efficiency, by replacing your bad storm windows and then making sure every possible opening on the seal between window and house was caulked properly) but broken sash cords is not one of them. One of the very coolest things about traditional double-hung sash windows is that they can be fixed with $5 worth of rope and some knowledge. The windows in my house are newer, and each time one of them breaks, as they are doomed to do, I sigh and cut another 2x4 to prop them open, because the track mechanisms are plastic, proprietary, and, I suspect, impossible for the layperson to replace.

Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't say replacing sash cords was always easy, because it's not. There are a variety of problems one can encounter, from discovering someone has removed the weights and sold them for scrap, or some industrious soul at the height of the energy crisis in the 70s blew insulation in the weight tracks, or (worst of all) inadvertently breaking the glass in the window you were trying to fix. Metal weather-stripping can be cantankerous; the trap doors and openings to reach the inner workings of a sash window can be so small that it makes one suspect that the Earth was peopled by hobbits when they were built. (Or possibly, and more horribly, attests to the ubiquity of child labor.) Despite all these possible detours, replacing a broken sash cord is a cool project, one that can acquaint you with the elegant and clever mechanism that makes a sash window work. Plus, stuff that works makes your life work too.

My next blog post will be the primer Anders wrote for this question. It contains a fair amount of specialized language and terminology, but we realized that couldn't be helped. Things have names, and can't be called “the thing” or “the other thing” or “no, the other other thing” without frustration setting in. It should no doubt include a picture, but, as I said before, we are a work in progress.

This blog is one of those things that I've been meaning to “get done” for some time, but the demands of scheduling and estimating have always interfered. That, and I have to admit, a fair amount of nervousness about posing as an expert, despite the fact that I've been gainfully employed as a professional painter for nearly ten years now.

When I considered how the format of this blog should work, I immediately thought of all the questions we ask and are asked on a regular basis. What kind of paint do you use? What's the right way to do this? Will this color work? Where is my painter's tool; I know I just saw it? The answers are: depends, depends, depends, and it'll be the last place you look. I don't think expertise is measured by how quickly one can come up with a glib answer, but how regularly and seriously you seek to expand your knowledge.

Although this may undoubtedly change as we work out the kinks, we will begin with a series of questions about painting, repair, and old houses in general. These questions have been suggested by our recent projects, and constitute a snapshot of the conversations we enact from day to day about the work that we perform. Now we can add to that performance a little written word.

Bear with us. As always, we are a work in progress.