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. The Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024 counts about 15,100 homes in the township, dates 48 percent to 1949 or earlier and 83 percent to before 1980, and that age is the starting point for any painting estimate here. Belleville also has a Historic Preservation Commission, which meets on the third Thursday of each month at Town Hall. Its page does not say what it reviews, so ask before exterior work on a designated property.
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. Two-family houses are 20 percent of the township's homes in the same survey. 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. Paid work that disturbs more than six square feet of paint in a room, or twenty outside, on pre-1978 housing takes an EPA-certified firm under the Renovation, Repair and Painting rule. NJ Painting Co. is not EPA Lead-Safe Certified, so we flag that part of a Belleville job at the estimate.
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.
