Plainfield was incorporated as a city in 1869 and covers about six square miles at the western edge of Union County, bordering North Plainfield, Watchung, Scotch Plains, Fanwood, South Plainfield, Piscataway, Dunellen, Edison and Green Brook. It grew as a railroad suburb, and both of its Raritan Valley Line stations, Plainfield and Netherwood, are still in use. The houses that went up around them are why people call it the Queen City. Plainfield passed its first historic preservation ordinance in 1979, and its residential districts include Van Wyck Brooks, Crescent Area, Hillside Avenue and Netherwood Heights. The Van Wyck Brooks district alone covers about ninety-nine acres, with Italianate and Second Empire houses, Queen Anne Victorians, and the stables and carriage barns that went with them.
Those houses ask a lot of an exterior painter. A Plainfield Victorian can have several hundred feet of trim, porch columns and spindles, brackets under the eaves, shingled gables and tall wood windows, and every one of those surfaces has a different amount of old paint on it. We scrape back to sound paint, spot-prime bare wood, point out rot at sills and porch floors rather than filling it, and caulk the joints that move. Owners often want a period color scheme with separate body, trim and accent colors, and we plan where each one goes during the color consultation so the house reads properly from the street. In the online copy of the city's zoning code we read, a Certificate of Appropriateness is required for a change in the exterior appearance of a contributing building, while exterior or interior painting of existing structures is exempt. If your house is in a designated district, confirm that with the city's Historic Preservation Commission, especially if the job goes beyond paint.
Nearly all of this housing is a century old or more, so the preparation is most of the labor on a Plainfield job and the site gets cleaned down every day rather than at the end of the week. The same applies inside, where original casings, staircases and built-ins often carry layers of old oil paint. Those need a bonding primer before a waterborne finish goes over them, or the new paint can peel off the old within a year. Damaged drywall gets repaired and spot-primed so the patches do not flash through the finish. The EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule also applies to these houses: paid work disturbing more than six square feet of paint in a room, or twenty outside, on pre-1978 housing takes a certified firm. NJ Painting Co. is not EPA Lead-Safe Certified, so we say at the estimate when part of a Plainfield job needs a contractor who is.
Beyond the historic districts, Plainfield also has later colonials, capes and multi-family houses, and storefronts along its downtown streets. The Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024 counts about 16,700 homes in the city and dates 85 percent to before 1980 and 36 percent to 1939 or earlier, with 30 percent in buildings of two to four units. We handle whole-house interior repaints, cabinet refinishing, staircase and banister refinishing, epoxy garage and basement floors, and commercial painting scheduled around business hours. NJ Painting Co. is a family-owned company based in Morganville in Monmouth County, and we travel to Plainfield for jobs. We are licensed and fully insured, every estimate is free and written, and the work carries a two-year workmanship warranty.
