Interior & Exterior Painting in Raleigh, NC

Age is the first question in Raleigh

Raleigh has the widest range of housing stock we work in — 1920s bungalows inside the beltline, a broad 1960s to 1980s ring, and new construction out past Brier Creek. For painting, the range matters for one reason above all others.

Residential lead paint was banned in 1978. Anything built before then may have it, under however many coats have gone on since.

Inside the beltline — Oakwood, Five Points, Hayes Barton and the streets around them — that is essentially all of the housing. The 1960s to 1980s ring straddles the date. North Raleigh and Brier Creek are comfortably clear of it.

Why it matters for painting specifically

Intact old paint sitting on a wall is not the danger. Turning it into dust is.

Which means the risky operations are exactly the ones a repaint involves: dry scraping, power sanding, burning off, and blasting an exterior. Those generate fine particles that spread through a house or across a garden and do not go away on their own.

So on any pre-1978 Raleigh property, the preparation method is the conversation, not an afterthought:

Test rather than assume. Inexpensive kits exist, and a certified inspector can give a definitive answer. If a house of that age has never been tested, the sensible working assumption is that it might be there.

Wet methods over dry. Wet scraping and wet sanding keep dust down substantially compared with the dry equivalent.

Contain rather than spread. Sheeting down, keeping the work area closed off, and cleaning up properly rather than sweeping.

No power sanding into unknown coatings. We will not take a disc sander to pre-1978 paint that has not been tested. That is not caution for the sake of it — it is the operation most likely to cause a problem.

Know where we stop. Extensive removal of deteriorated lead paint is specialist abatement and goes to a certified contractor. We will tell you if that is what you have.

The rest of the older-house work

Beyond the lead question, older Raleigh houses bring their own painting problems.

Many layers, of many ages. The failing coat is not always the top one. Where paint is lifting, it comes back to a sound edge and gets feathered so the repair does not read as a ridge under the finish.

Original trim profiles. Not sold anywhere, which is why they get repaired and repainted rather than replaced. Filling, sanding and cutting in around ninety-year-old trim is slow work and it is most of the labour in these houses.

Plaster walls. Which take paint differently from drywall and show every repair that was not properly matched. A patch that is flat but a different porosity dries to a different sheen and reads as a rectangle under side light.

Doors that have been painted many times. Enough coats and the hardware is buried and the door no longer closes cleanly. Sometimes the honest answer is stripping the door edge rather than adding another film to it.

The 1960s to 1980s ring

The neighbourhoods filling in between the beltline and the outer suburbs bring a specific and very common problem: oil-based trim under water-based paint.

Trim in houses of that period was frequently finished in oil. Latex applied straight over aged oil paint without proper preparation does not bond — it sits on top, and it peels off in sheets a year or two later, usually taking the top layer of whatever was under it.

The fix is not complicated but it cannot be skipped: clean, dull the surface properly, and use a bonding primer before the finish coats. If you have trim that has peeled in strips, that is almost certainly what happened.

North Raleigh and Brier Creek

Modern substrates, no lead question, and the work is the ordinary exterior sequence: wash off the chalk that ultraviolet has broken out of the old film, cut out and replace failed caulk joints, spot prime bare substrate, then paint.

Inside, mostly the builder-flat problem — walls handed over in a paint that marks if you look at it and cannot be washed without polishing a patch.

Climate and scheduling

Humidity, afternoon storms and surface temperature decide whether an exterior coating cures rather than just dries. Mid-summer afternoon sun on a wall is the worst condition — paint that dries too fast will not level or form a proper film. We work the shaded elevation through the hottest part of the day. Below about fifty degrees is the other limit.

Getting a price

Tell us roughly when the house was built. That is the first question we would ask and it shapes everything else.

For an exterior, photograph each elevation from far enough back to see the whole side, plus close-ups of any failing paint and a typical caulk joint. For interiors, a photo of each room and whether trim and ceilings are included.

Raleigh is about half an hour from us, with no travel surcharge.