Exterior painting is about more than just keeping up appearances on your street. A proper layer of paint on your home helps protect it from moisture, bacteria, mold, pests, and other environmental hazards. Failing to maintain, touch-up, or update your home’s exterior paint job doesn’t just look bad, but can also lead to serious problems for your home, both inside and out. 

The question remains: how often should you repaint your home’s exterior? There may not be one simple answer, but waiting until there is a visible problem is always a poor choice. Here we’ll discuss the major factors that play into the frequency with which you paint your home.

Local Climate

Depending on where you live, you may need to hire exterior house painters on a more or less frequent basis. This is because your home’s exterior must face the environment each and every day. In more temperate climates, where temperatures don’t fluctuate wildly, winds remain calm, and precipitation is kept to a minimum, your home’s paint job will naturally hold up for a longer time. Conversely, if you live in a region that experiences extreme weather conditions on a fairly regular basis, this turbulence will inevitably take a toll on your home’s paint over time.

Routine Maintenance

You may not be able to control the weather, but you can exercise control over how well you take care of your home’s exterior throughout the year. Cleaning your home via pressure or power washing even once or twice a year can greatly enhance your home’s appearance while also removing harmful materials that may have found a home of their own on your siding. Just be careful since too much water pressure and heat can actually damage and remove the paint from your home’s surface.

After cleaning your home’s exterior, you might find that certain isolated areas require minor paint touch-ups. Touching up your home painting can help you prolong the time needed for a full repainting. Of course, if the majority of your home’s exterior paint needs attention, it’s often better to simply hire house painters to go over the whole thing to start fresh.

Siding Material

What your home is made of also factors into how often you should have it repainted. Paint behaves differently when applied to different materials. For instance, on average, experts say that wood siding should be repainted every 3-7 years while cement fiberboard and brick may go as long as 15-20 years before requiring a new coat of paint. If you want to get the most out of your residential painting, you might consider investing in a new type of siding.

Quality of Prior Paint Job

When deciding whether or not it’s time to repaint your home exterior, you have to consider the previous paint job – not only when it took place, but the quality of the work itself. Perhaps you or the previous owner hired a painting service just a year or two ago. Regardless, if said service did a poor job, you may already require a new coat. If this is the case, be sure to hire a house painting company who can deliver on a quality, durable paint job this time around so you don’t have to worry about painting your home again for several years to come.

So, how often should you repaint your home’s exterior? If you take all of the above factors into consideration and come up with an average, conventional wisdom would say somewhere between every 4-8 years. However, as explained above, each scenario is different. When in doubt, get some advice from the experts. At All American Painting Plus, we’re happy to come over, inspect your home, and give you a free estimate on exterior painting and much more. To learn more about all that we can do for our clients in Northern Virginia, give us a call at (703)-620-5563!