Exterior paint costs in Knoxville

Knoxville gets a lot of wet days. Rain of a tenth of an inch or more falls on roughly 86 days out of 365, close to one day in four.

Exterior paint needs dry wood going on and dry hours after. Diamond Vogel, for one, says not to apply exterior latex if rain is forecast within 8 hours, or if moisture is forming on the surface. So in Knoxville, the weather is often what stretches a paint job out. A crew may get a good morning, lose the afternoon, and come back two days later. That's normal here, and it's better than painting over wet boards.

Age gives that water plenty to work on. Around two in five houses in the metro were built before 1980. Older wood siding has taken decades of those wet days, often under many coats of paint, and the paint on it tends to let go in patches rather than all at once.

One thing to ask your painter: once they scrape an area down to bare wood, will they prime it the same day? Bare wood left open to a rainy week soaks up water, and paint won't hold on it.