Interior Painting in East Brunswick, NJ

Dunhams Corners, Tanners Corner, and the blocks off Old Bridge Turnpike have the oldest homes in the township. Cape cods and farmhouses from the 1940s and earlier. Plaster on every wall, horsehair in some of it, and oil-based paint layered over itself five or six times on the trim. You press a fingernail into a windowsill and hit a ridge of old drips that have been painted over for decades. The walls crack at every corner and around every door frame because plaster moves. If you just roll paint over those cracks, they come right back. Setting compound first, then prime, then paint.

Colonial Oaks, Newton Heights, and the neighborhoods off Rues Lane and Cranbury Road are all 1960s and 1970s construction. Split-levels, bilevels, colonials. Drywall instead of plaster, but wallpaper everywhere. Dining rooms, kitchens, hallways, sometimes bedrooms. Pulling that wallpaper off drywall without destroying the paper face underneath is what we do more than anything else in East Brunswick. The trim is oil-based in almost every one of these homes. You can spot it by the yellowing around heat registers and the way it chips in hard flakes instead of peeling. Put latex over that without a bonding primer and a scuff sand and the new coat slides off within a few months. We finish trim with waterborne alkyd that flows out smooth and does not yellow back.

Closer to Route 18 and the Farrington Lake side, the 1980s and 1990s homes are bigger but built cheaper. Flat builder-grade paint on every surface, hollow-core doors that dent if you look at them, MDF baseboard that swells along the bottom edge if it has ever seen water. The paint in these homes wears fast because it was the lowest bid product from the start.