Ridgewood is a village of about five and three-quarter square miles in northwest Bergen County, incorporated in 1894 and home to just under 26,000 people at the 2020 census. Much of the village was built between the 1890s and the 1950s. The local history department of the public library traces the neighborhoods by date: Brookside from 1889, with Shingle-style and then Colonial Revival houses; The Heights, built out between 1892 and 1930; the Old Country Club area with its Tudor, Spanish Revival, Queen Anne and Craftsman homes; Floral Park from about 1910, known for foursquares, Craftsman houses and stone entryways; then Glen Acres, a 1938 development of Cape Cods, and The Lawns, more than four hundred capes from 1950. Tudor and Colonial Revival together make up about half the houses in The Heights alone.
That housing decides what an exterior job involves. A Ridgewood Tudor usually means stucco panels between dark half-timbering, often over stone or brick at the base, and the timbers and the stucco need different products and a careful line between them. Colonial Revivals and Dutch Colonials carry a lot of wood: clapboard or shingle, cornices, columns, dentils, multi-pane windows and shutters. On houses this age the paint has been built up over many decades, so the work is scraping back to sound layers, priming bare wood, replacing soft sills and trim rather than caulking over them, and only then the finish coats. We use premium Benjamin Moore and Sherwin-Williams exterior systems matched to each surface, and our written scope lists the prep separately so you can see where the hours go.
Nearly every house here predates the 1978 lead-paint ban, so lead-safe practice is standard on our Ridgewood jobs: plastic containment on the ground and around open windows, wet scraping instead of dry sanding, HEPA vacuum cleanup and a site cleaned down every day. The village also has a Historic Preservation Commission, and its code requires a historic preservation permit for changes to the exterior appearance of buildings in a historic district or on a designated historic site. If your house is in one and you are planning a new color scheme or replacing trim, check with the village first. We are glad to help you put the details together.
Inside, older Ridgewood houses often have plaster walls, original oak floors and stained or painted millwork. We repair plaster cracks and spot-prime the patches so they don't show, use a bonding primer where water-based paint goes over old oil-based trim, and can refinish the floors in the same project. Kitchens in the capes and colonials are frequent candidates for cabinet refinishing. NJ Painting Co. is a family-owned company based in Morganville, Monmouth County, and we travel up to Bergen County for jobs. We are licensed and fully insured, with more than twenty years in the trade. Every Ridgewood estimate is free and written, includes a color consultation, and the work carries a two-year workmanship warranty.
