Newark was settled in 1666 by Puritans from Connecticut led by Robert Treat, and it is now New Jersey's largest city, covering about twenty-four square miles of land where the Passaic River meets Newark Bay. Its housing is as varied as anywhere in the state. Near downtown, the James Street Commons Historic District holds one of the city's largest remaining groups of red-brick and brownstone townhouses from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the North Ward, the Forest Hill Historic District runs along the edge of Branch Brook Park with large houses from the 1870s to the 1920s in Colonial Revival, Victorian, Gothic Revival and Spanish Revival styles. The Ironbound, east of Penn Station, is mostly two- and three-family houses, many of them later covered in aluminum siding. Painting contractors in Newark have to read which of those they are standing in front of before they can price anything, and that is where our free estimate starts.
Masonry and frame houses need opposite approaches. On brick and brownstone, the question is usually whether the masonry should be painted at all. Unpainted brick that is in sound condition is often better left alone, while brick that was painted decades ago has to stay painted, with a breathable masonry coating so trapped moisture can get out. Wood cornices, window trim and doors on those townhouses are where most of the labor goes. On the frame houses, aluminum siding that has chalked to a powder needs washing and an adhesion test before it will hold a new coat, and the wood trim underneath gets scraped, primed and caulked properly.
Almost all of Newark's older housing predates the 1978 lead-paint ban, and much of it predates it by a century. We work lead-safe on every one of those houses as standard: plastic containment, wet scraping instead of dry sanding, HEPA vacuum cleanup and a site cleaned each day. On multi-family houses we also keep hallways and shared entrances clean and plan the work around the tenants who live there, so nobody loses the use of a stairway for longer than they have to.
Inside, the requests run from full interior repaints in owner-occupied two-families to plaster repair, refinished oak floors and cabinet refinishing in kitchens with solid boxes. For businesses, our commercial painting crews can work on storefronts, offices and common areas outside business hours so a shop on a main street does not lose a trading day. NJ Painting Co. is a family-owned company based in Morganville in Monmouth County, and we travel up to Newark for these jobs. We are licensed and fully insured, use premium Benjamin Moore and Sherwin-Williams products, and every estimate is free, comes with a color consultation and is backed by a two-year workmanship warranty.
