Exterior Painting in Ocean County

A great many lagoon and bayfront houses in Ocean County were raised or rebuilt after Superstorm Sandy, and that is the single biggest thing separating an exterior painting quote here from one in a landlocked county. A cottage that used to be painted off a stepladder now sits a full story higher on pilings. There is more wall, it is harder to reach, and there is a whole new category of work underneath: pilings, lattice, enclosed storage, stair stringers, deck framing and an outdoor shower that now takes weather from every direction.

The materials changed with the elevation. Much of the rebuilt stock is fiber cement or vinyl rather than the cedar and clapboard it replaced. Fiber cement holds paint well and goes longer between repaints, but every cut end made on site needs priming, and new trim installed on a rebuild often never got that treatment. Vinyl needs a vinyl-safe color. We check for both at the estimate rather than assuming a newer house needs less preparation than an older one.

Access is planned before anyone shows up. Staging a two-and-a-half-story elevation over a sand or shell driveway, over a bulkhead, or in the narrow side yard of a lagoon lot is a different setup from leaning a ladder against a ranch, and it affects the schedule and the price. We work that out while we are standing in the yard, because the alternative is finding it out on the first morning.

In the north of the county, Point Pleasant is bounded by the Manasquan River and split by the Point Pleasant Canal, and the Census Bureau dates 64 percent of its homes to before 1980, 24 percent to the 1950s alone. Brick, next door, has by the state's count the most privately owned waterfront of any municipality in New Jersey, 53.2 miles of river, bay and ocean front, with more than 10,000 of its roughly 45,000 structures in the floodplain; its busiest building decade was the 1970s. Older exteriors in both get a wash, an adhesion test on any chalking siding and a primer matched to the chalk before any finish coat is considered, and the water-facing walls are scoped on their own.

Through the middle of the county, Toms River, called Dover Township until 2006, has about three miles of ocean frontage and thirty-one of bay frontage, and the state's recovery report counted 3,970 substantially damaged properties there after Sandy, more than 1,100 of them on the bay or a lagoon. The 1960s and 1970s together account for 37 percent of its homes and 54 percent predate 1980, while the Old Village along East Water and Washington Streets keeps buildings from 1824 to 1868. Berkeley, around Bayville, has about thirty-five miles of shoreline, South Seaside Park on the barrier island included, and dates 30 percent of its homes to the 1970s. Farther south, Stafford counts about 4,600 homes in the flood zone, 1,250 of them substantially damaged by Sandy. On all of these the prep share of the job rises with age and exposure: sills, porch rails and trim ends that have been taking weather off the bay for decades.

Out west the housing is younger. The Census Bureau dates 24 percent of Jackson's homes to the 2000s and 42 percent of Lakewood's to 2000 or later, so the typical scope there is a first proper repaint over builder-grade trim, plus whatever the pine shade has done to the north side.

Which is why our exterior painters do not price an Ocean County house off the town name. The same repaint rules of thumb apply across the county, but the surfaces that reach the end of their life first are completely different in Ocean Gate than they are in Jackson.