Exterior paint costs in Greenville

Greenville grew up around textile mills, and the mills built houses. Brandon Mills had sixty-six houses up in West Greenville by the end of 1899, and the number grew to 450 between 1900 and 1903, according to the city's historic resources survey. The survey calls the saddlebag house type ubiquitous in Greenville's mill villages, and it still finds them throughout that neighborhood. Wood houses that old usually carry many coats of paint on their siding and trim.

As mill villages fell out of favor, Charles Daniel, a builder who had started out putting up mill houses, pushed suburban development along Interstate 385, the same survey says. So Greenville's housing runs from century-old mill cottages to postwar suburbs and beyond, and even after decades of new building, one Greenville-area house in three went up before 1980.

The Upstate sun is the other half of the job. On the sunny sides of a house, dark colors fade and chalk fastest. A deep red door or black shutters on a south or west wall will need fresh paint well before the rest of the house, so it's worth buying an extra quart of the trim color when the job is done.