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Atlanta Residential Commercial & Exterior Painting, Atlanta Painting Company, House Painters, Atlanta, Alpharetta, Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, Brookhaven, Buckhead, Roswell, Marietta, Milton, Decatur

Summer House Painting Specials

Although it has felt like summer for a while, the summer equinox just happened which makes it official.  After just one season in Atlanta, you quickly learn why they call it “Hotlanta.”

While the temperature outside is hot, GreenWave Solutions’ prices are cool.  We are offering 15-20% off all residential house painting and decorative concrete finishing services during the ENTIRE SUMMER!

This includes our core service area of Metro Atlanta;  Atlanta, Alpharetta, Brookhaven, Buckhead, Chamblee, Doraville, Dunwoody, Grant Park, Inman Park, Marietta, Milton, Roswell, Sandy Springs, and Vinings.

Our summer special includes the following services:

 

 

Interior Painters, House Painting, Exterior Painters

GreenWave Solutions Atlanta Painting Services Update

GreenWave Solutions has a very large website boasting many services.  We understand that it can be overwhelming so we created a list of services and their service areas.  These are our core products for which we have the greatest demand.  This list, by no means, represents the only services we offer.  If you don’t see a home improvement service that you need or don’t see your city listed, please call or email us because we still may be able to provide you our first class service that Metro Atlanta has become used to.

Here is a quick refresher of some of our most popular services that made GreenWave Solutions the finest green contractor in Atlanta:

Buckhead GA Painting Services

Sandy Springs GA Painting Services

Roswell GA Painting Services

  • Painting Contractor Roswell
  • Painter in Roswell
  • Roswell house painting
  • Exterior painting Roswell

Atlanta GA Painting Services

  • Painters
  • House Painting
  • Professional painting contractor
  • Color Consultation Atlanta

Dunwoody GA Painting Services

Brookhaven GA Painting Services

Again this does not represent everything we do, nor all the cities we serve.  We also provide the following high quality services:

  • Deck staining and sealing
  • Siding replacement
  • Wood floor installation
  • Wood floor finishing
  • Carpentry
  • Popcorn ceiling removal
  • Texture ceiling smoothing
  • Stipple texture ceiling smoothing
  • Wall paper removal
  • Rotten wood replacement
  • and much, much more!

GreenWave Solutions also proudly serves the following areas:

  • Alpharetta
  • Milton
  • Cumming (not all areas)
  • Marietta (not all areas)
  • Decatur
  • Chamblee
  • East Atlanta
  • Grant Park
  • Inman Park
  • Little 5 points
  • Virginia Highlands
  • Johns Creek
  • Duluth
  • Doraville
  • Vinings
  • Midtown Atlanta
  • And most other upscale parts of Metro Atlanta

Connect with GreenWave Solutions on Google +
 

Atlanta Cedar Shake Staining

Atlanta House Painting Services Inside The Perimeter

GreenWave Solutions, Atlanta’s first green painting company, has been covering the Atlanta area for 8 years.  Atlanta is made up of several neighborhoods whether you are considered Inside The Perimeter (ITP) or Outside The Perimeter (OTP).  To name just a few of the neighborhoods we cover Inside The Perimeter are Buckhead, Inman Park, Grant Park, Ansley Park, Morningside, Vinings and Virginia Highlands.  Our painting services include interior, exterior, residential house painting, deck staining, wood repair and replacement, wallpaper removal, popcorn ceiling texture removal, window replacement and more.

A large portion of homes Inside The Perimeter of Atlanta are older houses and need a little more attention and love than new construction.  Preserving older homes is different from working on houses that have been recently built.  Oftentimes, older homes are better constructed than newer ones, but that does not mean the work and maintenance is easy.  When it comes to paints and coatings, the products that were used are no longer being manufactured or may even be against the law to use.  Also, they can be harmful to our health and the environment.  Some examples are lead paint and asbestos insulation.

Even when older homes don’t have toxic chemicals or carcinogens in their building materials, an experienced professional is required to do work correctly.  Trained painting professionals know how to bridge the gap between the technology of the 1970′s and the 21st century.

30 years ago, using oil based paint on home’s exteriors was a standard practice, but in 2013 that is considered a big no-no.  Over the past decades scientists have learned that alkyd resins chalk, crack, and fade in UV light very fast.  Thanks to technological advances we now have  acrylic resins, which help protect the home longer and are much safer for the environment.

GreenWave Solutions’ painters are able to restore and preserve the beauty of Atlanta’s homes.

GreenWave Solutions is the best painter Sandy Springs and painter Dunwoody has to offer.  GreenWave Solutions offers painting in Alpharetta, Atlanta, Decatur, Sandy Springs, Roswell, Brookhaven, Duluth, Grant Park, Inman Park, Buckhead,Milton, Midtown, and more!

CMU wall with Efflorescence.

What is Efflorescence

Efflorescence.  What a weird word.

Efflorescence – ef-flo-res-cence (ef∋ le res∋ens), 1. a change on the surface to a powdery substance upon exposure to air, as a crystalline substance through loss of water. 2. to become encrusted or covered with crystals of salt or the like through evaporation or chemical change.

In English, efflorescence is that white, powdery stuff that you see on masonry walls.  Because this isn’t a chemistry class, we are going to focus on prevention and remediation, instead of causation.

Although efflorescence is ugly and sounds scary, prevention and removal are simple and inexpensive.

How to prevent efflorescence

This is very easy.  Make sure that the masonry substrate is  at least 14 days old.  If it seems uncured or “hot”, wait another week.  Then, prime it using a masonry primers.  Sherwin Williams makes a great product called Loxon Primer.

Once you have primed, simply apply an appropriate top coat and you are done.  If you followed all of the manufacturer’s instruction, you should not have any problems with efflorescence.

How to remove efflorescence.

This is more difficult than prevention, but it isn’t a huge problem.  First off, efflorescence is a cosmetic problem.  It does not degrade the monolithic strength of the substrate.  The efflorescence on the wall pictured above is ugly, but it won’t hurt the wall.  So if you have efflorescence and it doesn’t bother you, leave it alone.  If its unsightliness does bother you, here is how you fix it.

  1. Clean the efflorescence with muriatic acid.  Be careful; hydrochloric acid is nasty stuff.  You may need to dilute depending on the molar strength.
  2. Scrape the efflorescence.
  3. Make sure you have rinsed all of the muriatic acid and allow everything to dry thoroughly.
  4. Prime and repaint using the system described above in the “prevention” section.

I hope that you were entertained while reading this riveting expose` on efflorescence.

GreenWave is also the best interior house painters, exterior house painters, and house painting company and serves Atlanta, Alpharetta, Brookhaven, Buckhead, Chamblee, Doraville, Dunwoody, Grant Park, Inman Park, Johns Creek, Duluth, Milton, Roswell, and most major suburbs.

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Tannin Stain, Painting Company, House Painters, Atlanta, Alpharetta, Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, Brookhaven, Buckhead, Roswell, Marietta, Milton, Decatur

How to Avoid Wood Tannin Bleed from Knots

We completed a project last week that gave us some trouble.  Because this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this problem, I felt that it warranted an article so others can avoid this problem.  The problem is tannin and resin bleeding through knots and “self-priming” stains and paints.

Many of the new paints and stains boast “self-priming” properties.  The selling point is that “it requires fewer coats and products to finish the job so you save time and money.”  While this sounds awesome, it is misleading.

No current product that says “paint and primer in one” or “self-priming” is going to perform as well as separate primers and paints.  For simple applications such as interior painting on previously painted substrates, these products perform fine; but when getting into applications in a more demanding environment, they fall short.

I specifically speaking about wood stains that say “self-priming to prevent tannin bleed.”  My instinct is to ignore these statements and use a stand alone alkyd wood primer or shellac primer on wood, but this time I went just with the stain.  We used package white.  The painters sprayed and back rolled the product per manufacturers’ specifications.  It looked beautiful at first and everyone went home.  When we went back the next morning, every knot on one side of the fence had bled through the stain.

To be fair, this was the side of the fence that had the sun hitting it from first thing in the morning until about 2pm.  This heat causes the tannin and resin to be more active.  However, the data sheet should have said something about this.

I told the home owner I was unhappy with the product’s performance and I wanted to prime and put another coat.  Our client obliged so it time to research.  I have heard horror stories of people applying 3, 4, and 5 coats to still have the knots bleeding through.  I didn’t want to have a story of my own so I got on the phone with technical support.  They told the “self-priming” properties are weak and that it is still advised to prime.

I went with what worked with even the most “knottiest” wood (get the pun? knotty vs. naughty).

Shellac-based primers are the best primers for sealing in stains.  Shellac comes from the lac beetle.  I don’t remember how they beetle makes it, but I am positive that all shellac comes from this little bug.

We see shellac in our everyday lives.  The easiest example is on pills.  The shiny coating on pills or the plastic parts of capsules are examples of “food-grade” shellac.  Now that I provided a visual of what shellac is, it should be simple to see why it is such an effective sealer.

When shellac primers dry, they effectively seal the stain beneath a layer of plastic.

What makes these primers such great sealers is the same thing that makes them ineffective primers for exterior house painting.  Because shellac based coatings create a solid, rigid coating, they are only specified for “spot exterior” application.  This is because of the movement that exterior substrates exhibits due to expansion and contraction from temperature fluctuations.

For this reason, we spot primed the problem knots with an aerosol primer and repainted.  If the bleeding was throughout the wood, we would have opted for an exterior alkyd primer designed for bare wood.

After everything was completed, the fence looked beautiful, our client was happy, and GreenWave Solutions did another good job.  This is why we are consistently rated the best painters in Atlanta.

 

Daniel Macris is the president of GreenWave Solutions for 8 years.  GreenWave Solutions is Atlanta’s First “Green” painting contractor.  We specialized in commercial and residential painting.  We are launching our Atlanta kitchen and bath remodeling division soon!

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