Verona sits in the valley between the First and Second Watchung Mountains, with the Peckman River running along the bottom toward the Passaic. It became a borough in 1907 and covers under three square miles. Bloomfield Avenue is its main street, Verona Park and its lake sit at the center of town, and the Hilltop Reservation, opened in 2003 on the grounds of the former Essex Mountain Sanatorium, sits on the hill at the edge of town. Roughly a third of the houses date from before 1940 and another large share from the 1940s through the 1960s, so most Verona homes are either prewar colonials and Tudors or post-war capes and ranches, and our estimate begins by sorting out which. The Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024 counts about 6,000 homes in Verona and dates 88 percent to before 1980, with 33 percent built in 1939 or earlier and 21 percent in the 1950s. About 16 percent are in buildings of fifty or more units, where a condominium or co-op board's rules come first.
On the east side, near the Montclair border, the area around Afterglow Avenue has large Tudor Revival and other revival-style houses from the 1910s to the 1930s, which the township's 2017 historic resources survey and later Historic Preservation Commission records treat as a possible historic district. We could not confirm that a district has been adopted, so ask the commission before work there goes beyond paint. Those houses combine stucco, half-timbering, brick and wood windows, and each surface needs its own product. Stucco takes a breathable masonry coating, timbers and trim get scraped, primed and finished in a durable exterior enamel, and unpainted brick is left alone. Elsewhere, the post-war capes have wood or aluminum siding and painted trim with sixty years of coats on it, which we take back by hand before anything new goes on. Taking it back 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 Verona job needs one.
Cabinet painting is one of the most common projects in Verona. Many kitchens in houses of this age have solid wood cabinet boxes and doors with a finish that has worn through or a color that has not aged well. Refinishing gives a smooth, factory-like painted finish for a fraction of what new cabinets cost. Our process is to remove doors and drawer fronts, degrease and sand every surface, fill the grain on oak so it does not show through, prime with a bonding primer, and spray the finish coats. The boxes are masked and finished in place. Most kitchens are back in use within a week, and we will tell you plainly if a cabinet is too far gone to be worth refinishing.
We also handle full interior repaints, drywall repair, staircase refinishing and exterior painting on Verona's hillside houses, where the slope and mature trees make for damp shaded walls that need washing and drying out before priming. NJ Painting Co. is family-owned and based in Morganville in Monmouth County, and we travel north for jobs in Verona. We are licensed and fully insured, use premium Benjamin Moore and Sherwin-Williams products, and every estimate is free, includes a color consultation and comes with a two-year workmanship warranty.