Exterior Painting serving North Attleborough and Metro West MA.

Paint on clapboards fails from the bare wood outward. Water gets behind a cracked joint or a split board, the wood swells, and the film lifts. Much of the labor on an exterior job goes into finding those spots, fixing them and priming bare wood, before any finish coat goes on.

The town's housing has a median construction year of 1974, according to Census estimates, and 57.2% of its units went up before 1980. On a house that age, the siding may carry several coats of paint, and the condition of the oldest layers decides how much scraping the job takes.

Victorian and Colonial Revival detail in the historic districts

Several National Register districts cover parts of town. Along South Washington Street, between Elm and Sutherland Streets, the houses run from the 18th century to the mid-20th, in Georgian, Greek Revival, Stick, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles. In Attleborough Falls, the district on Mt. Hope and Towne Streets was built up from the 1850s, with Victorian houses added in the 1870s–90s, in Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne and Bungalow/Craftsman.

Houses in those styles can carry a lot of exterior trim: brackets, turned porch posts, shingled gables, cornice returns and window hoods. Each piece has edges and end grain where paint wears first. Pricing and scheduling such a house depends as much on the linear feet of trim as on the square footage of the siding, and multi-color schemes add time because each color needs its own cut lines.

Listing on the National Register does not, by itself, tell a private owner what colors to use. The National Park Service says listing places no restrictions on a non-federal owner unless federal money is involved. We found no local historic district with design review in town, and the Historical Commission's published role covers identifying and protecting historic assets, with a demolition permit item on its page. On those sources, the color is the owner's call.

Lead paint on older siding and trim

About one unit in five (20.6%) was built in 1939 or earlier. The EPA notes that lead-based paint was banned for residential use in 1978, and anyone paid to disturb paint in a home built before 1978 must be certified and use lead-safe work practices. Outdoors, that means plastic sheeting on the ground, no open-flame burning or uncontained power sanding, and daily cleanup so paint chips stay out of garden beds and play areas.

Our lead-safe painting page explains how containment and cleanup are handled on an exterior job.

Damp lots near the Ten Mile River

The town sits in the Ten Mile River watershed, about 54 square miles that also includes Plainville, Attleboro and Mansfield, according to the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance. The Cottage–Freeman and Attleborough Falls districts border the river itself.

On a house near water or deep shade, the north wall and the lowest courses of siding dry slowly. Mildew there should be washed off and killed before priming, otherwise it grows through the new coat. Cutting shrubs back from the siding lets the wall dry after rain.

How an exterior repaint is sequenced

Good weather for that sequence is the window between spring and late fall when temperatures stay above the paint label's minimum overnight. Our post on the best time of year to paint in Massachusetts goes into the timing, and common exterior paint failures shows what peeling, blistering and alligatoring tell you.

• Wash the walls and treat any mildew, then let the siding dry
• Scrape and sand loose paint, using lead-safe methods on pre-1978 surfaces
• Replace rotted clapboards or trim and fill gaps with exterior caulk
• Spot-prime bare wood and any repairs
• Apply two finish coats to siding and trim, and finish doors and shutters last