Exterior paint costs in Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor's historic district guidelines are blunt about how old wood gets cleaned. Blasting, power washing, and propane or butane torches are all on the list of methods that aren't appropriate for cleaning or stripping wood surfaces. What the guidelines do recommend is taking damaged paint down to the next sound layer by the gentlest means possible, hand scraping and hand sanding, and then repainting. Stripping painted wood bare for a clear "natural" finish is on the not-appropriate list too, and so is painting masonry that was never painted.

That advice reaches beyond the districts, since just over half of the metro's houses are from before 1980, and a gentle, hand-done prep is kinder to old siding no matter where the house sits.

The frost window is narrow. Ann Arbor's municipal airport logs close to 150 freezing nights a year, and its typical last spring frost doesn't come until around May 8, with the first fall frost back by about October 4. Hand scraping takes more days than a pressure washer would, so a full prep-and-paint job needs most of the summer between those dates.