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, cut out rot at sills and porch floors rather than filling it, and re-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. If your house is in a designated district, it is worth asking the city's Historic Preservation Commission what review exterior work needs before the colors are final.
Nearly all of this housing predates the 1978 lead-paint ban, most of it by many decades, so lead-safe work practices are standard on our Plainfield jobs: plastic containment, wet scraping in place of dry sanding, HEPA vacuum cleanup and a site cleaned down every day. 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. Cracked plaster gets repaired and spot-primed so the patches do not flash through the finish.
Beyond the historic districts, Plainfield also has later colonials, capes and multi-family houses, and storefronts along its downtown streets. We handle whole-house interior repaints, cabinet refinishing, hardwood floor 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.
