Exterior Painting across Attleboro, Massachusetts.

An exterior job is mostly decided before the first coat goes on: how much loose paint comes off, what rotted wood gets replaced, and whether the old layers contain lead. In this city those questions have different answers on different streets, because the housing ranges from an 1849 Greek Revival house on North Main Street to the 15.0% of units built in 2000 or later.

Single-family detached houses make up 54.4% of the housing units. Another 19.6% sit in buildings of two to four units. A three- or four-unit building simply has more wall, more windows and more doors to prep than a single-family house, and the upper stories add access work.

National Register properties and color changes

Several parts of the city are on the National Register of Historic Places. The Hebronville Mill Historic District, listed in 1984, covers Knight Avenue, Read Street and Phillip Street, and its listing names Greek Revival and Italianate as the architectural styles. The Blackinton Houses and Park on North Main Street, including the 1849 Willard Blackinton House, were listed in 1979. Individually listed houses include the Capron House on North Avenue, the Capt. Joel Robinson House on Rocklawn Avenue and the Herbert A. Sadler House on Newport Avenue.

According to the National Park Service, a National Register listing places no restrictions on what a private owner does with the property unless federal money is involved, though state or local preservation laws may apply. Our research did not turn up a local historic district with exterior design review in the city, but that is worth confirming before a major change. The Attleboro Historical Commission has listed regular monthly meetings at the public library, and the building department can tell you whether any review applies to your address.

Greek Revival and Italianate trim takes more prep

Greek Revival houses carry wide corner boards, deep frieze boards under the eaves and cornice returns at the gable ends. Italianate houses add scrolled brackets under the roofline and molded hoods over the windows. All of that detail has end grain, joints and horizontal ledges where water sits, so paint fails there first.

Brackets and window hoods get hand-scraped rather than power-washed hard, soft wood is consolidated or cut out, and open joints are primed and caulked before finish coats. If a bracket is too far gone, a carpenter can copy the profile; painting over rot only hides it for a season. The Hebronville district listing names both styles; around the Dodgeville Mill, the mill's 2018 National Register form counts about 23 mill houses along South Main Street, many altered with vinyl siding and replacement windows, so the first step there is sorting original wood trim from newer cladding.

Lead on clapboards and porches

Census estimates show 61.2% of the city's units were built before 1980, and lead-based paint was banned for residential use in 1978. Outside, the concern is paint chips that fall into garden beds and the play area, and dust that blows toward a neighbor's yard. The EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule applies when more than 20 square feet of exterior paint is disturbed on a pre-1978 house.

That means plastic laid out from the foundation, windows closed in the work zone, chips collected daily, and no open-flame burning. On a close lot or a three-family with neighbors a driveway away, containment also means watching the wind. Details are on our lead-safe painting page.

Siding on houses from the 1970s onward

Units built in the 1970s and 1980s together account for 27.4% of the stock. Houses from those decades may be sided with cedar shingles, clapboard, grooved plywood panels, aluminum or vinyl, and each takes a different approach:

• Cedar shingles: solid stain or paint after washing; check for cupped or split shingles first
• Grooved plywood panels: seal the bottom edges, which wick water and delaminate
• Aluminum: wash off the chalky oxidation and prime with an adhesion primer
• Vinyl: paintable only in colors rated for vinyl, since dark colors can make panels warp in the sun

Temperature limits and the fall cutoff

Exterior paint labels list a minimum surface and air temperature, and that figure differs from one product to the next. The surface also has to stay above that minimum and free of dew long enough to dry. Our post on painting in November walks through those limits, and common exterior paint failures shows what happens when prep or timing is rushed.