Bayville is the community at the center of Berkeley Township — the post office name dates to 1870, five years before the state set Berkeley off from Dover Township in 1875 — and for most people who live here it is simply the name of the town. The township runs to roughly forty-two square miles and falls into three distinct pieces: the belt along Barnegat Bay and both sides of Route 9, stretching from the Toms River in the north down to Cedar Creek at the Lacey line; the older inland pockets such as Pinewald, whose roots go back to the 1800s; and the large adult communities of Holiday City and Silver Ridge in the far northwestern corner. Three pieces, three completely different painting jobs. Our free estimate starts with which one you are in, because a bayfront rebuild and a Holiday City ranch have almost nothing in common. Bayville also butts up against the Pine Barrens on its western side, and that pine shade and damp is a mildew problem of a completely different kind from the salt exposure a mile east.
On the water, Bayville is a rebuilt town. The lagoon neighborhoods — Glen Cove, east of Bayview Avenue and south of Butler Boulevard, where the streets dead-end at Barnegat Bay with canals cut between them, along with Berkeley Shores, which dates to about 1960, and Good Luck Point — were largely single-storey ranches before Superstorm Sandy. What replaced them are big two- and three-storey houses on new foundations, and plenty of the surviving originals were lifted rather than knocked down. For a painter that means tall, exposed elevations with a great deal of fiber-cement and vinyl, new trim that still needs proper priming at cut ends, and wind off open bay that never stops. We spec coastal-rated premium Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore exterior systems and treat the bay-facing walls as their own scope. Height is the other thing that changed. A house that used to be repainted off a stepladder is now three storeys over a piling foundation, which means proper staging, a longer schedule and a harder look at the elevations nobody can see from the street.
Step back from the water and the housing gets older and much smaller. The neighborhoods off Route 9 and through Pinewald are full of shore bungalows and raised ranches from the 1950s through the 1970s — cedar and aluminum siding, painted wood trim, soffits and fascia doing all the suffering, and modest interiors where a repaint changes the whole feel of the house. Anything of that vintage predates the 1978 lead-paint ban, so we run lead-safe practices as standard: containment under the work area, wet scraping rather than dry power-sanding, HEPA vacuum cleanup and a site swept down at the end of every day, not the end of the week. These smaller houses also tend to have been added to over the years — an enclosed porch here, a converted breezeway there — which leaves an exterior made of three or four different substrates that each want their own primer. We work through them surface by surface rather than pretending the whole wall is one material.
Holiday City and Silver Ridge are their own kind of work again. These are single-storey units in established adult communities, where what matters is a crew that shows up when it says it will, works clean, uses low-odor premium paint so the place is livable the same evening, and does not leave a job half-finished over a weekend. Cabinet refinishing is popular here for the same reason it is popular everywhere in Bayville: it gives a dated kitchen a factory-smooth finish without the demolition and expense of replacement. We also refinish hardwood, install new flooring where the old material is past saving, and pour epoxy garage floors that hold up to the sand and winter road salt that every Ocean County garage collects. Whichever part of Berkeley Township you are in, the company behind the work is the same: NJ Painting Co. is family-owned, licensed and fully insured, more than twenty years in business and based up in Morganville, using only premium Benjamin Moore and Sherwin-Williams products. Every Bayville estimate is free, includes an in-home color consultation, and the work carries a two-year workmanship warranty.
