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Going Grey, or it’s not easy to Paint outside in the swing seasons

2 min readI wanted to squeak in one quarter of the house painting – the street side – before the weather got too cold for proper curing conditions. Here’s how I gamed the weather to get the job done!

Modern paint technology is pretty miraculously forgiving of weather conditions but there are still limits to the times of day and year that you can effectively get paint to stick to outside surfaces.

Since we wanted to get at least the front of the house painted in the fall, we found ourselves playing with two very important metrics for the paint – temperature and humidity.

At that time of year it was important that the primer go on during a relatively warm day and then be allowed to cure for 48 hours before the outside temperature dropped below 45 degrees.  So even when the day was sunny and warm, we needed to keep in mind the next two overnight low temperature readings.  AND it was vital to apply the paint when the humidity was low enough that we wouldn’t hit the dew point – or get actually rained on before the paint or primer had time to cure.

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To that end I carefully planned our priming and painting days around the weather forecast and managed to get our primer on the main house front, garage front and soffits, then come back and paint the soffits and finally the finish coat of paint.  It has been an unseasonably warm fall (hi, global warming), but I was still nervous that we’d run out of warm dry days (and nights) for painting.

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Several times I planned to sneak in a good painting day only to be thwarted by the changing forecast.  However in the end we managed it all and wrapped up exactly the requisite 48 hours before a few days of cold rain.  HOORAY.

I am so excited to tackle the other three sides of the house come spring but not too upset to have a weather mandated stopping point for the moment.  Getting the front of the house ready to go was WORK!

Read More: EXTERIOR PROGRESS: NEARLY DONE WITH NORTH AND SOUTH GABLE ENDS