This is year #4 of peeling and painting the house exterior. Everything to the left had been finished in a prior year, so I started with the wall facing the street, moving to the right. The plywood surface on the 16 foot plank has dry-rot in places, so I reinforced it by laying a 2x12 board on top.
In order to avoid the need to move the ladder and scaffolding more than I had to, I peeled and painted the upper half first, then peeled and painted the lower half.
This is the northeast wall. It is so wide that I had to move the ladders & scaffolding twice but two coats of paint overlapping helped hide the start/stop points. Each of these segments took several days to peel, sand, and then paint with our opaque stain.
This is the southwest wall. I was unable to work on this wall during mid-day because of bright sunshine and heat. Finally I thought of setting up a patio umbrella and then could work on small patches at a time.
Working quickly, I was able to peel a row of paint and leave it hanging from the wall. When I finished that row the peeled paint had cooled off and was brittle. I could scrape off the entire row in a single stroke.
The bottom half of this southwest wall is finished all the way to the French doors. It will take three stages of scaffolding to complete the upper half.
This section went very fast because I had a helper. Young Ian from next door needed an excuse to climb up onto the scaffolding, but he had fun scraping the brittle paint off the wall.
This left section of the upper half is now sanded down to bare wood and ready to be painted with opaque stain.
The middle section of the upper half is sanded down to bare wood.
The French door trim took extra time since it had suffered from weather damage. I removed it, repaired, replaced and painted it with white enamel trim paint before painting the beige siding.
My scaffolding would not fit into this corner, so I had to improvise. A wooden pallet board on top of two sawhorses worked perfectly.
The upper half is finished but now the lower half is all that's left.
Finally, September 22, the entire peeling and painting task is done.
The walls done during the first three year's worth of peeling and painting do NOT have any blisters or peeling paint. This is in contrast to every prior paint job we've done (where we didn't peel first before painting). In the past it only took a month or two before the paint began to blister and peel. Notice in photos #9 and #10 above, the final corner, lower half. The beige paint there is less than ten years old and it is covered with popped and peeled blisters.
At the date of this posting (10July2023), this paint job is 1 to 4 years old and there is still no sign of blisters or peeling. My conclusion is that cedar siding must be painted with stain, not paint. Once regular paint has been applied then that paint will begin to blister and peel, even after you paint over it with newer paint. All of the old paint must be removed and stain applied instead.
