Montclair sits on the eastern slope of First Mountain, the first ridge of the Watchung Mountains, and its higher streets look out at the Manhattan skyline about twelve miles away. The township was formed in 1868, and its growth followed the railroad. Today seven stations on the Montclair-Boonton line run through it, from Bay Street to Montclair State University. Most of the houses went up in the half-century after 1890, and they fall into three broad families: Queen Anne and other Victorians, Georgian and Colonial Revival, and Tudor Revival, which became the signature style of the Upper Montclair Historic District. Each one asks for something different from home painters in Montclair, and our free estimate starts by working out which you have.
Queen Anne and Colonial Revival houses are wood houses with a lot of trim: clapboard and shingle walls, deep cornices, porch columns and rails, and many original wood windows. Paint fails first on the horizontal surfaces, the sills, rail tops and porch floors where water sits. We scrape back to sound paint, cut out and replace soft wood rather than caulking over it, spot-prime bare wood, and finish with premium Benjamin Moore or Sherwin-Williams exterior systems. On the uphill streets under mature trees, shaded north walls stay damp and grow mildew, so we wash and treat it before any primer goes on.
Tudor Revival houses are a different job. Their stucco panels need a breathable masonry coating, not ordinary house paint, or moisture gets trapped in the wall and the coating blisters. The half-timbering is usually wood boards set into the stucco, and the joint where the two meet is where water gets in, so we clean out and re-seal those joints before painting the timbers. Brick and stone parts are left unpainted unless they were already painted. Almost every older house in Montclair predates 1978, so lead-safe practices are standard on all of them: containment, wet scraping, HEPA cleanup and a clean site each day.
Indoors, the work is plaster walls with decades of patching, original staircases and built-ins under layers of old oil paint that need a bonding primer, and kitchens where refinishing the cabinets makes more sense than tearing them out. We also refinish hardwood floors. NJ Painting Co. is a family-owned company based in Morganville in Monmouth County, and we travel north to Montclair for this work. We are licensed and fully insured, every estimate is free and includes an in-home color consultation, and the work carries a two-year workmanship warranty.
