Exterior paint costs in Virginia Beach

Before you sign with a painter, ask how they plan to clean your siding. In Norfolk's historic districts, the city's design guidelines recommend cleaning wood by hand brushing or low-pressure washing, 300 psi and below, and they list high-pressure washing as the wrong way to take paint off. They also warn against caulking the underside of wood siding to seal a house up, because that can trap moisture and cause more damage. Those are sound habits for any older wood house in the Virginia Beach area, where salt air and humid summers already keep siding damp.

The city's review board mostly stays out of color. Norfolk's guidelines say paint color is not typically reviewed by the Architectural Review Board, and they point owners who want a historic palette to city staff.

Most homes in the region are younger than those districts. The region's biggest building boom came in the 1980s, which added roughly 140,000 homes. A house from then is around forty years old, and its wood trim has had four decades of salt air.

Weather sets the pace of the job. Norfolk International logs about 74 days a year with a tenth of an inch of rain or more, so a repaint that looks like three days on paper can stretch over a week of waiting for dry siding.