The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

House Painting

But a cheap or quick-drying varnish will have ruinous effect. Boiled linseed oil dries with a gloss, and half the raw oil may be replaced by it, in which case the drier should be left out.
The effect of direct sunlight is to make paint hard and eventually brittle; hence on the south side of a house more oil may be used than is desirable on the shaded side, and roof paints should be the most elastic of all.

In fact, some of the best paint-makers put a fifth fish oil (refined menhaden oil) into roof paint, and it is probably good practice.

As a rule, tinted paints last longer than pure white, because the color keeps out the chemical rays of sunlight, which are harmful to paint. For example, " Colonial Yellow," which is white lead tinted with chrome yellow, used as a body color, is more durable than the same white lead without tint used to paint the trim white, though all the exposure conditions are the same.

Exterior Painting

If we are to paint the outside of a new house, the first thing is to go over it and " stop " the knots and pitchy places, stopping This is done by covering them with a coat of heavy shellac varnish. The tendency is for the pitch in the knot to ooze out and soften the paint and discolor it. The shellac is supposed to stop this, but it does so only very imperfectly; however, there is nothing else to do. This is so serious a difficulty that the late Mr. Masury, a celebrated manufacturer and paint expert, addised leaving the house unpainted, to the weather, for a year; by which time the pitch will be either washed out or hardened. In fact, it is not unusual for the paint applied to houses of southern pine to come off in the course of two or three years (or one year), and then the next paint adheres all right. However, most people insist on having a new house painted immediately, and the best that can be done is to stop the knots and the worst places with shellac. This works better inside than out.

Then the priming coat is to be applied. Consider now what will happen if a coat of good thick paint is put on a clean board.

The oil is rapidly absorbed; but the pigment stays on the surface, and having no oil, or little, to bind it, it shortly becomes a dry powder and falls off. To prevent this, the obvious thing is to use less pigment and more oil.