Knowing your Finishes for Exterior Painting

Direct sunlight can degrade the binder and pigment of paint, causing it to chalk and lose its gloss. All paints will lose some degree of colour and gloss over time but lower-quality paints will generally lose them much earlier. Latex paints that are not 100% acrylic, as well as oil-based paints, are the two biggest offenders. Be safe and go with at least a mid-grade 100% acrylic paint. 
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‍One-Coat CoverageThis is an area which we believe is greatly misunderstood, and unfortunately this confusion benefits the paint manufacturers.

The whole concept of a one-coat coverage paint is extremely appealing to any reluctant weekend warrior who's staring down the barrel of a daunting paint project. Afterall, who wouldn't want to cut their painting time in half, right?What they don't tell you in many cases is that these one-coat coverage paints are not ideal for every situation, and they don't apply the same as traditional paints do (at least not if you want them to work correctly).

Don't get us wrong, when used correctly and in the right situation they can be real labour-savers. But in other scenarios they can reduce the longevity of your paint job or even cause massive paint failure.Apply It At The Proper Thickness. There's no magic involved in how these products do what they do. They're able to achieve two coats worth of coverage in a single coat because they're most-often thicker than regular paint and, unlike regular paint, they can be applied at twice the normal thickness without running or sagging down the side of the house.

Where the misunderstanding comes in is that if you don't apply them at the proper thickness, you aren't really getting two coats worth of paint, which will lead to another re-paint in your near future.If you're going to use these products, our advice is to find out the specific application recommendations from the product label and apply it as directed. Since this will usually involve applying the coating at double (7-8 mils) the normal wet film thickness (3-4 mils), and since that can be very difficult to determine, we would go as far as to say you should purchase yourself a simple wet mil film thickness gauge to monitor your wet paint thickness as you apply it. Use It to move your home beyond a house.

The problem with these products exists around the ones that are intended to be used as a primer-finish, or self-priming product. As acrylic paint dries it shrinks. When acrylic paints that are twice as thick dry, they can have the tendency to shrink more aggressively than their counterparts. But where the real issue occurs is when you have a paint that's twice as thick that bonds well enough to act as its own primer, when it shrinks it can literally pull old layers of paint right off the side of your home, causing widespread coating failure. The basis for this claim doesn't come from anecdotal evidence, but from one of the major paint manufacturers who had this very issue on a national level when they first released their one-coat product and over-marketed it to the public as the best solution for all repaint situations.

The truth is that these products do have their place, but in our opinion that place is on new siding or siding that has minimal layers of existing paint from the not-so-distant past that are well adhered to the substrate. If a one-coat coverage product is not a fit for your project, then opt for a good primer (where necessary) followed by two coats of a high quality 100% acrylic paint that has good colour hiding capabilities (usually a thick coating). You'll get nice, uniform coverage and it's hard to go wrong when you go with Beyond.