When Should You Repaint Your Home?

Whether you have a brick exterior or wood or vinyl siding, faded or peeling paint can make your home more vulnerable to water seepage and UV damage. A fresh coat of high-quality paint can protect your home from environmental elements while also making it the best-looking property on the block. Learn more about some of the early signs it’s time to repaint your home.

Faded Paint

All exterior paint is designed to resist UV penetration, but opaque paints (which have the highest number of particles per square inch) generally provide the best protection from the sun’s damaging rays. But eventually, the UV protection of even the best paints will break down, leading to fading.

If certain parts of your home are shaded, you may begin to notice a major shade difference between these protected areas and sun-exposed ones over time. Faded paint provides far less sun, wind, and rain protection to your home, and this aging process can snowball into damage quickly.

Peeling or Cracking Paint

If you’ve started to notice spiderweb cracks in your home’s paint, the peeling process has already begun. And peeling paint not only makes your home look shabby, but it can also make it vulnerable to termites, water damage, and a host of other problems.

For homes that were last painted in the 1970s or earlier, there’s also a good possibility this peeling or flaking paint contains unsafe levels of lead. If your paint is cracking or peeling, it’s a good idea to apply a fresh coat sooner rather than later.

Stubborn Staining

Even if you’re meticulous about power-washing the outside of your home once or twice a year, it can be hard to remove stubborn water stains or other mysterious stains once they’ve set in. As paint ages, it becomes less impervious to stains; in some cases, the amount of pressure-washing it would take to remove a stain would destroy the remaining paint as well. If your home has developed a few dirty patches you just can’t remove, new paint may be the answer.

Exterior Damage

It’s a good idea to give your home a good once-over each year to identify potential problems in the making. If you’ve discovered some exterior damage like rotting wooden windowsills, broken siding, or chipped brick, applying a fresh coat of paint over the repaired area can give your home new life.