Painting a pre-1978 Salt Lake home

An older Salt Lake house has been painted eight or ten times. Some of those layers are oil, some are latex, some went on over surfaces that were never washed, and the earliest ones are old enough that lead-based paint was still the norm for residential use. Lead was banned for that use in 1978, so any home built before then is treated as though it has some in the stack somewhere.

This is the ordinary case here rather than the exception. The Avenues, Capitol Hill, Sugar House, Liberty Wells, and the post-war west side were largely built well before 1978, so on most exterior repaints inside city limits, the crew is working on old paint from the first scrape.

Why old paint changes the prep

Disturbing paint turns it into chips and dust. On a 1995 house that is a nuisance and a cleanup job. On a house whose bottom layers may be lead-bearing, it is the reason the prep gets done a particular way: contained, wet or vacuumed rather than dry-sanded into the air, and cleaned up at the end of each day instead of left in the soil and the flower beds.

None of it changes the painting itself. It changes how the surface gets to the point where paint can go on, which on an older house is most of the labor anyway.

What the old paint requires

• It has to land somewhere it can be picked up again. Chips fall outward as well as straight down, so the sheeting below the work covers the whole fall zone and is held against a valley wind that arrives without warning. Soil and flower beds are the one place debris cannot be recovered from.
• It must not become airborne. Heat guns and open flame turn old paint into fumes, and dry power sanding turns it into a cloud that crosses a property line easily. Both convert a manageable problem into an unmanageable one.
• Water and suction keep it where it is. Wet scraping weighs the debris down; a sander with a vacuum attached collects it at the point it is made. Either way it stays inside the containment rather than in the air.
• It leaves at the end of the day. Bagged, with the sheeting folded inward to trap what it caught, so what came off the house does not spend the night in the yard.

Interior work on an older home asks for more of the same: sealed doorways, floors and furnishings covered rather than draped, and a more careful final clean than the equivalent job outdoors, because the dust has nowhere to go.

What you will notice

Plastic on the ground, a vacuum running at the sanding, and a crew that is slower through the prep stage than they would be on a newer house. That extra time is the thing you are paying for in the prep line of the quote, and it is the reason two bids on the same older home can be thousands of dollars apart.

Expect the cost effect to be real but modest. On a trim-and-fascia scope the setup is quick to lay and quick to lift. On a full exterior with widespread peeling it is a more substantial share of the labor. Either way it belongs to the preparation stage rather than to the painting, which is where it shows up on a Salt Lake City quote.

Assume rather than test

On a Salt Lake home with a hundred painted components and decades of layers, most crews simply work as though the old paint is lead-bearing everywhere, which is faster and cheaper than testing every element. If you would rather have the surfaces tested, say so before the quote is written, so it lands in the scope rather than in a conversation halfway through the job.

When it stops being a painting job

Repainting an old house safely is ordinary work done carefully. Permanently removing a lead hazard from a home is a different and more specialized discipline with its own equipment and its own specialists. If a hazard has been formally identified in your house, that is a conversation with one of those firms, not with a painter.

For the broader picture on older Salt Lake homes, see the historic homes guide and the older-home interiors guide.