Painting in the west Cook County suburbs

These are some of the oldest suburbs in the region. Riverside was planned in 1869 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and became a National Historic Landmark in 1970, and Oak Park has the largest concentration of Prairie style buildings anywhere. Around them, La Grange, Western Springs and Brookfield are full of early twentieth-century houses and bungalows.

Work in these towns starts with what is already there: plaster walls over wood lath, original wood windows and trim, and many layers of paint, most of them from before 1978. That means containment and lead-safe practices whenever paint is disturbed, and repairs that keep original detail rather than replacing it.

Many houses in these towns have been painted by several different contractors over the decades, so we often find layers that do not bond well to each other. Testing how the existing paint holds, then scraping back to a sound base, is part of planning the job, and it is the difference between a repaint that lasts and one that peels in a year.