Painting an old house? The colour is the easy part

WORDS: Ocean Road Editorial Staff PHOTOGRAPHY Supplied

Painting an old house? The colour is the easy part

I’ll tell you what nobody warns you about when you buy an older home. You pick the paint colour, you’re excited, you tape off a wall on a Saturday morning, and then you actually look at what you’re painting onto. Cracks you didn’t notice at the open house. Trim that’s been painted so many times the profile has gone soft. My own house is a little awkward and a little old, and every room I’ve touched has taught me the same lesson. The outcome is decided before the colour ever goes on.

So if you’re standing in a paint aisle right now with three swatches in your hand, put them down for a second. Let’s talk about the part that actually determines whether your room looks good in a year.

Why the surface matters more than the shade

Here’s the thing about colour. Two people can buy the exact same can of the exact same white and roll it onto two different walls. They get two different rooms. Not because one of them is a better painter. Because one wall was prepped and the other wasn’t.

Paint is thin. It’s a skin. It shows you everything underneath it, and on an older home there is a lot underneath it. When light rakes across a wall in the late afternoon, every skipped step shows up. The little ridge where old paint was peeling. The dip where plaster cracked and nobody filled it. You don’t see these things at the store. You see them at 5pm when the sun comes in sideways and you think, huh, that wall looks weird.

What’s actually going on under old paint

In a mid-century or older home, the paint you see is rarely sitting on a clean surface. There are usually several layers underneath, some of them lead-based, along with hairline plaster cracks and wallpaper that was painted over rather than removed. On an older house most of the labour happens before the first coat of colour, and the firms that do this work say so plainly: one Brisbane painting and decorating company, DC Decorators, has a client review on its site describing an older cottage where lead paint and asbestos, plus decades-old wallpaper, all had to be dealt with before the walls were repainted. That is the part a colour swatch cannot tell you, and it is the reason two rooms painted the same shade can end up looking completely different a year later.

I bring them up because they’re honest about it, and honest is what you want on an old house. They hold a QBCC licence (number 15331027) and they do a lot of Queenslander and older-home restoration, so the lead-and-wallpaper situation is just the normal job for them. That’s the mindset you’re after whether you hire someone or do it yourself. The colour is the reward at the end. The prep is the work.

The lead paint part, please take seriously

I’m going to slow down here because this one actually matters for your health. If your home was painted before the late 1970s, assume there’s lead paint in the layers somewhere until you know otherwise. You cannot sand it dry and open a window and call it fine. Sanding lead paint throws fine dust into the air and into your lungs, and it settles into carpet and gets tracked around the house.

You can buy a cheap lead test swab at the hardware store and check before you disturb anything. If it comes back positive on a big area, that’s the moment I’d stop and call a professional rather than tough it out. Leave your DIY pride out of this one. It’s the step where a pro with the right containment and the right mask earns their fee.

Plaster, trim, and the wallpaper you thought was paint

Say the lead question is handled. Now you’re into the ordinary old-house stuff, and there’s a real order to it.

Plaster first. Older walls are plaster over lath, not drywall, and they crack in fine lines as the house moves through the seasons. Rake out the crack a little so the filler has something to grab, fill it, let it dry, sand it flat. A skim coat of filler dragged wide across a bumpy old wall does more for the finished look than any colour choice. If you press on a wall and it flexes or sounds hollow, the plaster has come away from the lath behind it, and that needs stabilising before paint, not after.

Then the trim. Old timber moulding has usually been painted a dozen times and the crisp edges are buried. Caulk the gaps where the trim meets the wall, because those thin black shadow-lines are what make a room read as tired. Sand the trim so the new coat has a key to stick to. Don’t skip this on old oil-based trim especially, or your fresh paint will peel off in sheets a few months in.

And the wallpaper. If a wall looks oddly thick, or the corners are lifting, someone painted over paper. Painting over it again just buys you a worse version of the same problem. Score it, soak it until it lets go, pull it, then wash off the old glue before anything else touches that wall. It’s a slow, sticky afternoon. It’s also the difference between a wall that looks new and one that looks patched.

When to just call someone

I’m all for doing it yourself. I fixed my own awkward pantry and I’d do it again. But I’ve learned where the line is. If you’ve got confirmed lead or asbestos across a whole room, or plaster that’s failing over a big area, that’s past a weekend job. Getting a professional painter in for the prep and doing the fun colour coats yourself is a completely reasonable split, and it’s what I’d suggest to most people with a properly old house.

Pick your colour, definitely. Fall in love with it. Just know that the wall you put it on is doing most of the work. Get the surface right and almost any colour looks good. Get it wrong and even the perfect shade looks off by winter. Do the boring part. Hit it!