House Painters in Newark, NJ

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. The Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024 counts about 121,500 homes in the city and dates 66 percent to before 1980 and 24 percent to 1939 or earlier. Only 13 percent are detached houses, while 18 percent are in two-family buildings and 22 percent in buildings of three or four units. The city has seven designated historic districts: Forest Hill, Four Corners, James Street Commons, Lincoln Park, Military Park Commons, North Broad Street and Weequahic Park. We could not confirm what review paint needs in them, so ask the city before a district job.

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 is a century old or more, and the paint on it has been built up coat on coat ever since, so the scraping, sanding and priming take far longer than the finish coats do. 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, and the site gets cleaned each day rather than at the end of the week. Paint of that age brings in the EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, which requires a certified firm for paid work disturbing more than six square feet of paint in a room or twenty outside on pre-1978 housing. NJ Painting Co. is not EPA Lead-Safe Certified, and we say at the estimate when part of a Newark job needs a contractor who is.

Inside, the requests run from full interior repaints in owner-occupied two-families to drywall repair, refinished staircases 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.