How-to Paint an Old Barn

The barn came with the house. We are not sure how old it is. It is a nice big barn about 30x40ft. The structure and roof seem to be very sound. I love the big sliding doors. The wood siding however, was rotten all around the bottom edge — some places worse than others. We determined that the rot was likely caused by water streaming off the roof and bouncing up against the siding. The right side in particular had poor drainage and puddles would form all along that side during and after rain showers. Another cause of rot were the trees all around it when we moved in. They kept the wood shaded and damp. Luckily, we already had those cut down our first year here. Here is how we set about fixing and improving the barn.

Day 1: Pressure wash the barn

This was my first time pressure washing anything. I read the manual, hooked it up to the hose and the power, put in the soap, and used the low setting.

I concentrated on areas that looked moldy or where paint was flaky. Most of those were around the bottom edge. I started by rinsing the whole thing. Then I applied the soap in small sections (about 8ft square) at a time working from the bottom up. And then I rinsed it working from the top down.

One window was cracked when we moved in. I duct taped it.

The back of the barn looked like a completely different color. It gets a lot less sun and hadn’t faded much.

Day 2 and 3: Demolition and re-siding

Most of the siding around the bottom of the barn was too rotten to be saved. Here is an example of how rotten the boards on the right side were:

We decided to tear off the bottom boards and start fresh. The siding is the same as the plytanium that they sell at Home Depot. It comes in 8×4 ft sheets. The side of the barn is 12 ft tall with a full 8ft sheet on the upper half and 4ft around the bottom. I am grateful to whoever it was that had the forethought to put it together that way. It made it possible to just replace the bottom pieces. Hubby and I worked together on this part over Labor Day Weekend.

We experimented with various demolition methods and eventually the hammer and XL crowbar became my tools of choice. We think whoever put the siding on originally must have been using a nail gun. There were 36 nails in each 4ft square. I have not done the math, but I am pretty sure that I pulled out about a thousand siding nails. I was able to get some sections off all in one piece and others were painfully removed one board slat at a time.

Hubby did all the cutting and nailing in of the new boards. I did all the demolition. It was a good team effort other than the fact that he was waaay faster at his job than I was. I stayed out until 11pm Saturday night trying to get ahead of him and he still caught up by Monday night.

Day 4-14: Painting

Yes, you read that right. Even though I employed as much child labor as I could, painting the exterior of the barn took 10 days of effort, spread over almost 3 weeks, depending on the weather. Thankfully, we had a lot of dry days in September.

The kids did a fantastic job helping. At first, it was all Tom Sawyer, everyone wanted to help and it seemed fun. After the first two days, it was a chore.

I struggled a lot with the color. I wanted something that would look good with a brick house and that we could use as the color scheme for all future outbuildings. I like things very matchy matchy. I don’t like blue. I thought it would be almost impossible to find a red that did not clash with the brick. And we may whitewash the brick some day. I love green. I looked at a lot of green barn pictures online that I hated though. I worried that the green would be too similar with all the green trees etc. in the background.

I kept going darker on the paint cards until I landed on ripe olive. After the first coat I almost panicked and went back to the paint store to get them to add more black. But after consultation with my sister and my level headed husband, I decided to leave it. When the afternoon sun is shining full on it, the tone gets to be a little too yellow, almost army green-ish, but most of the day and in all cloudy weather it is a lovable gray green that looks wonderful in its setting.

Recommendations for painting wood siding

My husband’s parents live in a house with wooden siding and Grandpa J takes care of it himself. He had a lot of helpful recommendations for painting exterior wood:

#1. Use a heavy nap roller

The plytanium siding is very rough. The heavy nap roller was still not deep enough to get down in the creases between boards, but it worked well on the textured “grain” of the plytanium. We ended up doing each one of the cracks/creases between boards with a brush.

#2 Use a telescoping rod

Grandpa J’s most helpful suggestion was attaching the roller to a telescoping rod so that I could roll paint on most of the upper portions from the ground. The big kids used that rod and roller quite a bit to help as well.

Getting up on that super tall ladder was terrifying! I like rock climbing. This seemed a lot more scary. No harness, no climbing pad, and nothing to grab. I tried to always keep one hand on the ladder and definitely not look down. I hummed hymns to distract myself. I am so grateful that I was able to do most of the upper parts using the telescoping rod from the ground. I just had to paint the cracks and upper edges on the ladder.

#3 Use the best quality paint you can afford

We used Sherwin Williams Duration paint in Ripe Olive. They had their big 35% off sale over Labor Day weekend and I was able to get the first 15 gallons of paint and supplies on sale. According to their paint calculator, it should have only taken 10 gallons to do 2 coats. The new plytanium siding soaked up paint like a sponge and the weathered old upper siding was not much better. My child laborers and I used 10 gallons on the first coat before I had even done the gables.

The duration paint went on nice and thick, with good coverage. The instructions suggest that one coat should be enough in most cases, but I did two coats over most of it because of the plytanium’s rough texture.

After the green paint was finally all done I went around with the caulk gun and filled in as many of the carpenter bee (or other) holes in the white trim as I could.

The bright white spots are my caulked holes.

The white trim painting was tricky because I had to do it without getting any on the green. I used a very small brush on some parts. Hubby joked that I would eventually be using a single blade of grass. It didn’t get quite that bad. Hubby did the white trim on the gables to save me from the stress of going around again on the tall ladder.