House Painters in Montclair, NJ

Montclair is a township in Essex County, formed in 1868 from part of Bloomfield, on the eastern slope of First Mountain, the first ridge of the Watchungs. It is served by two ZIP codes, 07042 and 07043, the second covering Upper Montclair. Its houses are older than almost anywhere else we travel to. Census estimates for 2020 to 2024, from the American Community Survey, count about 16,500 homes in the township and date 59 percent of them to 1939 or earlier, and 86 percent to before 1980. Fewer than one in ten has been built since 2000.

Montclair has four local historic districts, Pine Street, Town Center, Upper Montclair Business and Watchung Plaza, as well as individually designated landmarks. The township's own descriptions of them name Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Italianate, Renaissance Revival, Neo-Classical, Craftsman bungalow and Tudor Revival buildings dating from the 1840s to the 1960s. In a district or on a landmark, a change to the exterior needs a Certificate of Appropriateness. The township's list of exemptions includes exterior and interior painting and like-for-like repair, so a repaint in the same materials does not need one. Replacing a porch rail or a door with a different design is another matter, so check with the township's historic preservation office before the job grows beyond paint.

The wood houses carry a lot of trim: clapboard and shingle walls, deep cornices, porch columns and rails, and original wood windows. Paint fails first on the horizontal surfaces, the sills, rail tops and porch floors where water sits. We point out soft wood rather than caulking over it, prime bare wood the day it is exposed, and finish with premium Benjamin Moore or Sherwin-Williams exterior coatings. On streets shaded by mature trees, north walls stay damp and grow mildew, so we wash it off and let the wall dry before any primer goes on. Stucco panels on Tudor houses need a breathable masonry coating rather than ordinary house paint, and the joint where the half-timbering meets the stucco is re-sealed before the timbers are painted.

With so much of the town built before 1978, one federal rule matters more here than almost anywhere. Federal law, in the EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, requires firm certification for paid work that disturbs over twenty square feet of exterior paint, or over six square feet in any one room, on housing built before 1978. NJ Painting Co. is not EPA Lead-Safe Certified. If your trim or siding needs scraping or sanding past those limits, that part of the job belongs with a certified contractor, and we will flag it when we quote rather than halfway through the job. Ask every bidder on an older Montclair house how they are handling it.

Indoors, the work is plaster walls with decades of patching, original staircases and built-ins, and kitchens where refinishing the cabinets makes more sense than tearing them out. NJ Painting Co. is a family-owned company based in Morganville in Monmouth County, and we travel north to Montclair for this work. Every estimate is free and written.

More on exterior painting in Montclair.