Vancouver's wooden houses are failing quietly, from the outside in. A West Broadway contractor who has spent three decades on the city's ladders explains why the coating is almost never the problem.
The staircase looked fine from the sidewalk. Painted a soft grey, glass panel railing, black non-slip strips down the middle of each tread, a tidy lattice skirt closing off the underside. The kind of side entrance you would walk up a thousand times without thinking about it.
Then somebody put a thumb on the nose of the third tread and it went in.
By the time the crew of 12 people from Renaissance Solutions Painting & Carpentry had finished opening it up, there were wood shavings across four steps and daylight where the tread ends used to be. Rust bleed had been weeping out from under the fastener heads for years - thin orange tears down the risers, the sort of thing a homeowner reads as "needs a coat of paint."
"That rust tells you something," says Eric Goodwill, who has run Renaissance since 1992 and finished more than 788 projects so far. The main office address is 1892 W Broadway #200, Vancouver, BC V6J 1Y9. "It's a fastener rotting in a wet pocket. The paint on top of it is doing its job. The wood underneath stopped doing its job about five winters ago."
This is the argument Goodwill has been making, one estimate at a time, for the better part of three decades: in a city that takes roughly 1,200 millimetres of rain a year, most exterior paint jobs do not fail because of the paint.
A housing stock built for a drier idea of itself
Vancouver's west side is dense with houses that predate the war, and a great many more that went up in the sixties and seventies. Wood frame, wood siding, wood trim, wood decks and stairs bolted onto the back of them. Cedar shingles on the gables. Stucco below.
None of it was designed with much margin for a climate that spends five months of the year damp.
The failure pattern is monotonous once you know it. Water finds a horizontal surface - a stair tread, a deck board, the flat top edge of a fascia board, the bottom rail of a window sash - and sits there. Paint is a membrane, not armour. It develops a hairline crack at a joint, usually where two pieces of wood move against each other at different rates. Water goes in behind the film. It cannot get back out.
Then it does the thing water does in a wall, which is nothing visible at all, for years.
"People call us because the paint looks tired," Goodwill says. "Half the time the paint is the last honest thing on the building. It's held on longer than the wood it's stuck to."
From painter to painter-and-carpenter
Goodwill did not set out to be in the rot business. Renaissance started as a painting company, and for years the carpentry was something that got subcontracted or, more often, quoted around.
The problem with quoting around it is that it produces a bad job.
"You can't feather-sand a rotten board into a good one," he says. "You can prep it beautifully. You can put two coats of the best product on the market on it. It's still a rotten board with an expensive finish, and I've just charged somebody to make their problem invisible for eighteen months."
So the company absorbed the carpentry trade. Renaissance now writes scopes that move between the two without a seam in the middle: strip and re-varnish a fir front door in the morning, cut in new rake flashing in the afternoon. Rebuild the sides of a deck, then stain it. Replace a stair stringer, then paint it to match the sixteen-year-old colour on the rest of the flight.
That combination is less common than it sounds. Painters are set up to leave when the prep is done. Carpenters are set up to leave when the framing is sound. The gap between them is where most exterior projects go sideways, and it is usually the homeowner standing in it, holding two quotes that do not quite meet.
What "prepared properly" actually means
Ask Goodwill what separates a fifteen-year exterior from a five-year one and he does not talk about brands, at least not first. He talks about documents.
Renaissance writes its specifications against the Master Painters Institute Repainting Manual and the Craftsmanship Operating Procedures laid out by the PDCA's Craftsmanship Forum. Preparation is specified by standard, not by adjective - Level 1 "Basic" per P14-06, and up from there depending on the surface. Manufacturer instructions supersede the manual where the two disagree, which with modern self-priming coatings they frequently do.
It is not glamorous. It is the reason a proposal from this company runs to several pages of what will and will not be touched, including a section headed "Questionable Areas" that exists purely to name the things that are excluded before anyone is disappointed about them.
The finish spec is similarly unromantic: two coats, brushed and rolled, "free of runs, sags, drips and holidays." Benjamin Moore Aura or Sherwin-Williams Duration on wood. UltraSpec on stucco. Sikkens ProLuxe on the doors that want a solid body stain. A Purdy 2½-inch or 3-inch brush and a 15-millimetre lint-free sleeve for siding.
"Spray is faster and there's a place for it," Goodwill says. "But on a hundred-year-old siding profile you want the film worked into the surface, not laid on top of it. That's a brush and a roller and a person who's paying attention."
One gable, eleven operations
A job the company took on this past summer illustrates the point better than any spec sheet.
A gable end, roughly 90 square feet of shingle field, with a three-lite transom window and a decorative arched attic vent set into it. The homeowner wanted it repainted. What it actually needed was to be taken apart.
The scope that came back ran to eleven distinct operations before anyone opened a can of finish. New primed Western Red Cedar shingles, hand-cut at both rakes and keyed around the window and the vent. DuPont Tyvek behind them. Aluminum Z-flashing along roughly 28 linear feet of sloped rake. Galvanized step and kickout flashing at the gable-base-to-lower-roof junction - about 22 feet of the most important detail on the entire wall, and the one most often skipped. Head flashing over the transom. Formed aluminum, sealant and mesh at the arched vent. A drip cap over the new belt board so water is directed past the stucco below rather than into it. Something on the order of 100 linear feet of polyurethane sealant at trim-to-cladding and trim-to-window joints.
Only then: oil-based stain-blocking primer on the field-cut edges, two coats of semi-transparent waterproofing stain on the shingles, two coats on the rake boards, fascia and belt board.
The work also had to interlock with a roofer's tear-off day, which meant a platform built on the existing roof surface a day or two before the shingles came off.
"That's the job," Goodwill says. "Eleven things, and the homeowner sees one thing, which is that the gable looks right. If we get it wrong they don't find out for four years, and by then it's a framing problem."
What homeowners get wrong
Goodwill's advice to anyone about to book an exterior in the Lower Mainland is short and slightly unwelcome.
Stop shopping on the finish, and start reading the prep. Two quotes that both say "two coats" can differ by a factor of three in labour, and the difference is entirely in what happens before the first coat.
Ask what the contractor will do when they find rot, because they will find rot. A company with no answer to that question has an incentive to not look very hard.
The regular warranty we give is 2 years, so look for the similar deal.
Look at the horizontal surfaces and the bottom edges - stair treads, deck boards, the underside of window sills, the joint where a deck ledger meets the wall. That is where the building is losing.
And accept that the honest number for a Vancouver exterior is higher than the one that gets quoted over the phone, because the phone quote is priced on the assumption that everything behind the paint is fine.
"Nobody's ever thanked me for the estimate," Goodwill says. "They thank me four years later, when the neighbour's place is peeling and theirs isn't."
Back at the side entrance, the stair got new treads and new stringer nosings before it got a colour. The homeowner had been planning to have it painted.
