Keep your home’s ornate features looking their best with professionally applied paint.
Victorian-style homes are beautiful and historical structures that owe much of their charm to their delicately designed trim. The ornate nature of this trim is commonly enhanced through the use of a paint color that contrasts the rest of the house. If you own or have seen a Victorian style home, then you know how eye-catching this lacy decorative trim can be.
Maintaining the charm of an older Victorian style home requires regular upkeep. However, this ornate style of house is known for requiring more demanding forms of maintenance, especially when it comes to repainting the intricate features of decorative trim.
If you are looking to freshen up the appearance of your home’s specialty trim, then you are in the perfect place. Here are the best tips and tricks to help you paint even the most detailed areas of trim with ease.
Clean
Cleaning an area before you paint it may sound like a no-brainer, but this is a very important part of maintaining ornate trim on historic homes. All of the crevices, openings, and corners created by decorative trim are liable to collect dirt and debris. This is true regardless of how well covered or high off the ground your trim may be.
General precautions are necessary for reaching high areas of trim and for avoiding any of the visitors that covered sections of aged trim may attract. In the Massachusetts area, these visitors are most likely to be birds, bees, or even wasps. If you do encounter any animals who have created a permanent residence in your decorative trim, you will need to contact a removal service before carrying on with your cleaning.
Once you can safely reach your trim and it is free of any wildlife, you can begin to scrub it with a damp sponge, a toothbrush or other fine-tipped firm brush, and some water. Paint does not adhere well to dirty surfaces, so be sure to scrub every area of the trim and do your best to reach inside of holes and deep grooves.
Note that we do not recommend power washing your ornate trim pieces, especially if they are lacey or you have not inspected their integrity. Historic homes can become fragile over time, and some decorative aspects, like ornate trim, may break from the force of pressure washing.
Prep
As with most interior and exterior paint preps, the next step is to sand your trim. If your trim is especially textured and consists of rounded shapes, then hand sanding is going to be your best bet. There are a wide variety of tools available to help sand hard-to-reach places, so choose whatever suits you best. In some cases, wrapping sandpaper around a rod can help you sand the insides of small ornate openings in the trim.
Once the surface of your trim is smooth, you can set up any precautions you see fit to avoid misplaced paint. Painters tape is a helpful option, and detailed trim is liable to drip, so you may want to place a tarp under your workspace.
Paint
The final step is primer and paint! You should keep a clean damp cloth or sponge on hand at all times during the painting process to clean up any messy lines or paint drips. Depending on the size and shapes included in your Victorian home’s trim, you will want a variety of paintbrushes to work with. A larger angled brush is best for covering large areas, while smaller fine-tipped brushes are best for detailing.
Detailing ornate trim can feel tedious, but it’s never a good idea to cut corners. Hard to reach areas may still be visible from different viewpoints, so it is important to strive for full coverage. Globing paint into the tighter spaces is also counterproductive as it may create drip marks and make the trim look less crisp.
Professional Preservation
Here at Zuck Painting, we understand that it can be difficult and time-consuming to maintain the trim of your Victorian home. Our professional painters are trained to preserve the beauty of historic homes in Massachusetts, and we offer free estimates. If you are interested in enhancing the beauty of your home’s ornate trim, general exterior paint, or interior paint you can find us at our website or call us at (508) 250-7272