Andy Sewrey: So we’re here at a house in Madrona in Seattle, Washington. This house is about 80 years old. It’s a pretty typical style paint job for us. This was a repaint; this was not a restoration. This was our third project this year for a full exterior with Fine Paints of Europe. We’re pretty proud of that. So, what we’ve got here are all the waterborne, or the emulsified waterborne Fine Paints of Europe Eco finishes: satin on the body and full gloss on the trim.
And as we look at it, we’re really just kinda stepping back and checking out the sheen and just the hardness of the finish; it’s a really rich finish. So if we come around the corner here you’ll really be able to take a good look at this, the way it all lines up.
Read Owner Jordan Greenburg’s Project Review
This is the south elevation of the house. This will be definitely the one that gets the most weather. As you can see that’s gonna be a pretty impervious coating.
John Shearer: Why don’t you go up there and give it a scratch?
Andy: So with a lot of paints that if you even rub on em they’ll burnish and whatnot, but this stuff, it’s just bombastic. There’s no other way to put it. It’s – it’s just plain old hard.
John: Trim and gloss?
Andy: Trim is full gloss Eco.
John: Body’s satin; how ‘bout the door?
Andy: Door is full gloss Eco as well, in a darker base. And this is a custom color that we had help from Daly’s to create. This isn’t a stock color out of anyone’s color selection.
Man: I mean it just – it’s fantastic. The colors –
Andy: Let’s, uh – Brian, will you come over here please? So this is Brian Paulson, he’s our rep at Daly’s Paint, who’s our supplier of the Fine Paints of Europe. And Brian, why don’t you tell us about the story to get to that color?
Brian Paulson: Well the – basically the homeowner had a couple different colors and they were trying to figure out a color, and it’s the one thing I’m pretty good at is dissecting and understanding what somebody is asking for when they’re not able to pull a color. And it ended up my first shot seemed to work out great and – they were happy with it.
John: Tell me how you guys arrived at the color.
Andy: We sent out about four different samples to the customer. They narrowed it down to two, one that was fairly gray and one that was fairly red. They picked the gray, then they didn’t like the gray, we purpled it up a little bit more and then we had to slide back into the gray realm a little bit to get here. So ideally we were just trying to get the reds to work with the grays that are already on the house.
John: How do you decide when a customer is going to use Fine Paints of Europe Eco? Is that something that you drove, or…?
Andy: We suggested it. On this particular project it was part of the value engineering. We had some pretty tricky staging to deal with here, and once we realized that the – the costs associated with actually getting up on the east elevation of the house, it made sense to just use the absolute best product we could find, and the Fine Paints of Europe fit the bill. So, in the end it really wasn’t that huge of a cost hit, based on what we had to do to actually stage the project in the first place.
John: How’s the application of the product?
Andy: This was all sprayed and backbrushed. Our painters love it, they absolutely love it. It lays down really nice. There’s some skill involved in applying it. It’s – it’s not a thick – super thick-build coating like a lot of the 100% acrylics that are out there, but once you find your touch with it, there’s really nothing better.
John: So if you were going to paint your own house what would you use?
Andy: If I was painting my own place I’d use this.
John: What sheen?
Andy: Y’know, I would go at a minimum the satin on the body and the gloss on the trim, although depending on what level of prep I decided to go to on the siding I might just do a full gloss, blingin’ house – just for fun.
John: Let’s take a look at the front!
Andy: OK.
John: You mentioned there was – it wasn’t a full restoration but there was some carpentry and, and – and stuff, huh?
Andy: There was carpentry involved. We did a lot of carpentry repair up on the chimney, and surprisingly enough on the north elevation of the house, mostly siding work. And then we did find some areas of rot here on the front porch, which is another phase of work, but this entire front porchlet area is going to get rebuilt and repainted. There was a lot of cupping siding here and a few split boards that we decided to take care of.
John: Can you walk us around the side and show us what needed scaffolding actually?
Andy: Sure. This was one of the trickier staging jobs we’ve had in the last coupl’a years. We’re coming around under the north elevation here, and as we go through this breezeway you’ll be able to see that the property line is less than four feet off the corner of the house, which goes up at every bit of 30 to 40 feet. So there was no pitch and no real way to get in there. I’ll go up top here and kinda point it out.
This peak we could stage with ladders. Everything around the corner was fully scaffolded. And the footprint down here that we had to set our scaffolding on was like I said, less than four feet wide. It was a pretty tricky set. We can walk around through the breezeway to get a good look at it. If you follow me you’ll be able to see it pretty well.
So this corner right here constitutes the highest point of the project. If you look down, we have barely more than my shoulder width into the laurel jungle, and if you look straight up – we had to go up there. This simply could not be done by ladders.
John: I see what you mean about the sheen.
Andy: Yup. Here we have the leftover piece of siding that we had pre-primed that we were gonna use as needed. Pretty beautiful paint job the way it all turned out.
Then we come back around to the full east elevation where we started. Another part of this project that required scaffolding was what’s behind me right now. Which may be difficult to see in this shot, but above this lower picture window, and above this big gutter, that’s a full atrium skylight. They had to cantilever the scaffolding over that. So they built a tower up the front and then suspended off of that back to reach the peak above it. So when you look at what looks like a pretty classic Seattle home, was incredibly complicated to stage.
