Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 12, 1992 TAG: 9202120129
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
DAD'S ADVICE ON PAINTING WEATHERS WELL
He taught me to shave. To drive. To eat, and enjoy, pickled herring. And never to paint the house in the winter.My dad never let me down. I shave well. I drive well. I eat pickled herring well. I do not paint my house in the winter.
I never wondered why I should not paint my house during the winter, simply accepting with a childish trust that it was not done and, if it were, something horrible would befall the offending winter brushman.
For that reason, my own house has been partially painted for three years now. I resume each April 19, a month after the swallows return to Capistrano. I stop for the season on Oct. 23, the day the swallows cut out for Mexico.
It is not, apparently, a universally held taboo, this bit about winter painting. I have seen house painters at work all over town these past couple of weeks, lathering the eaves and the porch rails and the window frames of houses with fresh coats of paint.
It has been unsettling to see professionals so flagrantly violating my dad's rule. To admit that my dad was wrong would be to detonate explosives at the base of my psychic Hoover Dam.
Over and over again, I drive past the freshly winter-painted houses searching for some clue, some evidence, some vindication for Dad. Perhaps the woodwork spontaneously ignites. Or collapses. Or harbors mutant strains of the Beijing flu.
Seeing no such travesty, I turn to therapy.
Bill Boylan works in the laboratory at the Blue Ridge Paint Works in Henry, Franklin County. He makes paint. He knows what makes paint tick. He can talk to you about resins, emulsifiers and surfactants, though no one understands him when he does, so he is rightfully hesitant.
Boylan knows his latex from his alkyd, and he's a hard-liner: 50 degrees or higher for latex paint, 45 for oil-based. If the nights are dipping into the 20s or the 30s, give it up. Nights have to be consistently milder than that for paint to have a prayer.
Defy those basic rules, he says, and the house will still look good the day after the painter finishes. A week later, it'll look fine, too.
"You won't see anything for six months, maybe a year. The paint won't bubble off or anything like that," says Boylan. "But then you'll see hairline cracks, or maybe some flakes."
The problem is not in the painting, it's in the drying.
It is far more complicated than walking across a freshly painted porch floor to see if you track paint into the house.
Boylan lapses into talk about chemical reactions and adhesion. Though paint may dry to the touch within hours, he says, it takes weeks to dry through and through.
The colder the temperature, the slower the drying. That leaves wet paint to get pelted with dust and mold and humidity. It takes the shine out of glossy paints.
"If at all possible, wait until spring," says Boylan. "If you must paint, go ahead. But it may not last."
Boylan, frequently called upon to diagnose consumers' paint problems, can exhaustively describe the relationship between relative humidity and alkyd paint performance.
But to me, what he's really saying is the sweet truth: Dad was right. You don't paint your house in the winter.