Is it time to repaint your house? Here are 8 warning signs

When you’re living in a desert climate, your home’s exterior may need repainting more often than you think it should.

But even though a quality paint job may cost from $3,000 to $5,000 or more, depending on the size of your house, repainting every five or six years is less expensive than doing major repairs on the wood panels or stucco walls of your home.

There are warning signs that can alert you to the need to put fresh paint on your house to protect it from the blazing summer sun and monsoon weather.

These problems may also indicate that some areas of the exterior need repair work before you paint. However, your painter can probably help you resolve these issues.

So, as you inspect your house, take notes about shabby spots you might notice. Then you can show them to your painter in advance, rather than simply expecting workers to find them.

Here’s how to get started on inspecting your house:

1. Run a dark towel over the stucco on the south and west sides of your home. If chalky paint comes off on the towel, it’s a sign that your current paint job is getting close to the end of its lifespan.

2. Check out the stucco carefully for cracks around windows and along your foundation. If any cracks are thicker than a credit card, it’s time to paint. Before repainting, your painter will probably fill any cracks with an elastomeric compound. In the future, that compound will move with cracks if they widen and will help prevent water from seeping through the walls.

3. Look for bare concrete or peeling paint around the foundation as well. If you have wooden siding, check the foundation to see if the siding is bowing out or bending as well.

4. Hunt on the wood trim of your house for signs of peeling paint. That should include the flat pieces of wood around the edge of your roof; technically, painters call these boards the “fascia.”

5. Sometimes your entire patio cover is framed in wood. If the rafters or that framing has dark areas, it may be a sign that the wood has been damaged due to rot or mold.

6. If you have a patio ceiling covered in drywall as many homes do in central and southern Arizona, look for tape seams coming loose, texture crumbling off or cracks appearing in the ceiling.

7. Inspect for the same kinds of problems in the drywall ceiling at the entranceway to your home or on the ceiling of a porte-cochère or roofed structure that is covering a driveway.

8. Since you’re probably going to repaint, check for problem areas on your outdoor fence walls. If they are covered with stucco, they probably need fresh paint. If the paint on the walls is peeling or bubbling up in some areas, you want to have the stucco repaired. Cracks will need to be filled as well, just as you’re going to do on the walls of the house.

If you do your homework, hire the right painter and give the painting company some solid info about your home’s issues, you’ll be amazed at how wonderful your house will look once the job is done.