Old victorian house, repaint the whole house or replace the siding completely ?

[Luis Arellano]

I have this beautiful old victorian house. The exterior needs major work, the paint is peeling and given the age of the house I have to assume there is lead paint.  So far my options seem to be:

1) Scrape old chips + Repaint the whole house.  ~11k.  (+ any wood replacement)

2) Replace the whole siding of the house.  ~34k 

3) Creative option? 

The value of the property is around $550k. How would you approach this decision? I'm leaning towards simply repainting the house, but I'm afraid I will not end up liking the end result. The painter said "Since this home has many areas of large peeling paint the surface after primer and paint will not be smoothed as before will have texture."

Any thoughts? 

[Andy Sabisch]

We have done several 1800 homes and love the finished product. We did one from 1843 that had not seen a paint brush in decades and yes, the paint was lead based.  A few lessons we learned that may be of help.

1)  If you go the paint route, make sure the painter is certified to deal with lead paint.  The one we started with was not (despite what Sherwin Williams store said) and it resulted in the job getting red tagged and shut down by the city and then the state.  Trying to get another painter in was twice as hard as they had to deal with the mess the first one left.  You can find lists of qualified painters on line and make sure they are on it!

2) No matter what any painter tells you the final product will look like, with the siding in the condition yours is in, you will not be happy with the final product unless they cost is quite high - sanding each board down is time consuming and expensive.  If having an alligator skin texture is acceptable to you, they make sure you are clear as to how much sanding they will do.

3) There is vinyl siding out there that is designed for older homes like yours . . . . scallops, patterns, etc.  You will pay more but it is virtually maintenance free going forward.  This is not what you will find at LOwe's or H-D . . . find a siding company that does old homes and see what they offer.

4) Final pitfall we stumbled into was make sure the house is not in a designated historic district or is on the national register . . . one we did was and it made any changes we wanted to make 10 times as hard.  Vinyl siding was not even going to be considered.  Even paint colors were dictated and doing exterior work makes it easy for code officers to see what is going on.  The National Park Service guidelines are usually what the city will drive you to follow if they can and that means unless it is too far gone to fix, you need to restore to original.

Be happy to help you further as we love these homes - just learned a lot in doing them.