Top 5 Exterior Paint Products

We are almost done with exterior painting for the year and are finishing up our last two exterior projects in New Westminster and Coquitlam. This uncharacteristically nice weather has made for a great exterior painting season.

Every year, at the end of the exterior painting season, we sit down and discuss what products we liked the best, how new products performed and what we will be using next year.

So here it is. Warline’s list of the top five exterior paint products.

Cloverdale Paint Sharkskin Solid Hyde Acrylic Stain

New on the market this year, Cloverdale Paint’s Sharkskin promised to deliver a quality solid stain product with lots of bite that could stand up to the weather of the Pacific Northwest. Mother Nature is tough on our wood decks and we’ve been looking for a product that performs. We are impressed with Sharkskin. It goes on easily (it applies more like a paint than a stain) and can be formulated in pretty much any colour. More importantly it does what it promises: covers in two coats, is scuff resistant, is UV protective and water repellent. We used it not only on decks but on siding, porches, railings and sheds.

If your deck is aged and showing signs of time and wear, it is likely you are going to be using a solid stain instead of a semi-transparent stain to cover and hide imperfections. Sharkskin is your product.

Benjamin Moore Aura Waterborne Exterior Paint in Low Lustre Finish

This choice isn’t as much about the performance as it is the look. We use lots of Aura and it is a high quality paint for exteriors. The colour lock technology puts it high on our list for fade resistant paint. This year Benjamin Moore offered a new finish in its Aura line – Low Lustre. It sits in between a flat finish and a satin finish.

We used low lustre on a couple of heritage houses with rich colours and the low lustre finish was perfect for bringing out the richness of the colour. We especially like the look on shingles. This is a great paint in a great finish.

Sherwin Williams Resilience Exterior Acrylic Latex Paint

We started using this product last year when we had a couple of late season exterior jobs that we needed to get done. Resilience is a great product for any application where moisture is an issue. If you are painting your house in the Spring or Fall or if you live in an area that gets a higher level of rain, fog or just general moisture level or say your house is surrounded by trees, Sherwin Williams Resilience is an excellent product.

XIM Peel Bond

Bless the inventors of this product. It’s like a can of facelift for your house. Peel Bond is a bridging primer that helps build up a smooth surface on old, rough and uneven surfaces. This stuff worked wonders on some of the old heritage houses we worked on, especially on old siding that had years and years of paint layers and taking the wall down to bare wood wasn’t an option. Our team loved the way Peel Bond could take distressed wood siding and trim and dramatically improve the look of it. As well, its fast dry time allowed for mulitple coats in a short period of time.

Kovrd 3 in 1 Paint Tray Bag

Even though it’s not a paint, this product gets honourable mention on our list of top exterior paint products. Kovrd is a plastic tray bag with a zipper to store a tray and roller full of wet paint that unfolds to become a drop sheet as well. We started using these in our new construction division where we are painting multiple houses that are all at various stages of building. Kovrd allowed our team to spend less time on daily clean up and more time painting. They simply loaded the roller with paint and zipped up the bag until the next time they needed that colour. The other upside – fewer daily cleanings of rollers and paint is meant less impact on the environment.

There were lots of great paints and tools we used this year but these were the ones that stood out for us. The right products combined with the right skills can produce killer results when restoring or repainting a house. And of course great weather helps too.