Interior painting in Leavenworth

Interior work is where an old house gets interesting. Plaster behaves differently than drywall, hundred-year-old trim has a paint history, and the walls are rarely as flat as anyone hopes.

Plaster is not drywall

A lot of pre-war Leavenworth houses still have original plaster over lath. It takes paint well when it is sound, but it fails differently — hairline cracking that reopens, spots where the plaster has let go of the lath and moves when you press it, and old patches done in materials that do not take the same finish.

Painting over a loose section looks fine until the next winter. The right answer is to find the soft spots before anything gets coated, and to price the repair honestly rather than skim it and hope.

Old trim carries its history

Original woodwork in these houses has often been painted five or six times. What that means on a repaint: the profile is already softened, edges are filled, and aggressive sanding can take you into layers you would rather leave alone — see the lead note below. Usually the right move is a clean scuff, spot repair, and a coating that levels well, not a strip-to-wood restoration nobody asked for.

If you do want the trim taken back to bare wood, that is a different job with a different price, and worth saying up front.

Lead applies indoors too

The EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule is not exterior-only. Sanding interior trim or walls in a pre-1978 home disturbs paint the same way, and the same certification and containment requirements apply. In practice that means plastic, controlled sanding, and HEPA cleanup — not a shop vac and a broom.

Ceilings, and the honest advice about them

Ceilings are the surface people skip and then regret, because the fresh walls make the old ceiling obvious. If the room is getting painted anyway, the marginal cost of the ceiling is small compared to doing it as its own job later.

The exception is a textured or acoustic ceiling in a pre-1978 house. Those can contain asbestos, and the answer there is testing before disturbance, not painting over it and hoping.