Belleville is an old place for its size. The Reformed Dutch Church of Second River put up its first building here in 1697, and its churchyard holds the graves of more than sixty Continental Army soldiers. The township itself was incorporated in 1839 and covers a little over three square miles, with the Passaic River along its eastern side and the Second River forming much of its border with Newark as it runs through Branch Brook Park. It calls itself the Cherry Blossom Capital of America and bills its spring display as larger than the one at the Tidal Basin in Washington. Most of the housing went up in the first half of the twentieth century, and that age is the starting point for any painting estimate here.
House painters in Belleville mostly work on two kinds of building: single-family colonials on modest lots, and two-family houses, some side by side and some stacked one unit over the other. Many have had aluminum or vinyl siding added over the original clapboard, which leaves the wood trim, porch columns, soffits and window casings as the parts that still take paint and still fail. We concentrate the prep there. Loose paint gets scraped back to a sound edge, bare wood is spot-primed, open joints are caulked, and soft wood at sills and porch floors is pointed out rather than filled over and hidden. Chalky aluminum is washed and tested before we coat it, and vinyl gets a vinyl-safe color so the panels do not warp in summer sun.
With so much of the housing built before the Second World War, slow prep is simply how jobs run in Belleville: scraping and sanding by hand rather than by machine, and a clean site every evening rather than a clean site on Friday. The same applies indoors, where original door and window trim often carries several layers of old oil paint. That trim needs a bonding primer before any modern waterborne finish goes on, or the new coat will peel away from the old one within a year or two.
Inside, the typical project is a full repaint for a family that has owned the house for years, or one unit at a time in a two-family, where the walls, trim and kitchen all need doing around the people living there. We can repaint, refinish solid kitchen cabinets and bring the staircase back on the same schedule, which keeps the disruption to a single stretch of work rather than three. NJ Painting Co. is family-owned and based in Morganville, in Monmouth County, and we travel north to Belleville for this work. Every estimate is free and in writing, includes a color consultation, and the work carries a two-year workmanship warranty.
