Ravenna Park Benjamin Moore Aura Low Lustre Review Wet Weather

JS Painting Company painted this beautiful craftsman home right off Ravenna park in July. We had a few challenges facing us going into it. One was that the brackets on the supports were never properly primed so they had rusted underneath the paint. A few nail heads around the house were also rusting which is because those particular nails were either not hot galvanized/stainless steel, or they weren't caulked over before priming and painting. In both instances, we used a rust converter/primer and painted it - problem solved. The other problem we had to deal with was much more significant. In short, the house is about a hundred years old and had many layers of paint caked onto the siding. This poses a big problem because the older layers of paint become rigid and brittle. A high quality paint adheres really tightly and is also very flexible. The result is that the top coat pulls the old paint off the wall causing bubbling. Your run of the mill repaint won't do the trick in a situation like this - you'll find yourself chasing bubbles all over the place. As soon as you pop a bubble and sand it out a new one will spring up right on the edge of the old one. This is something that all owners of older homes should be weary of. The way we dealt with it was to shim out the boards that were having problem so that we could eliminate trapped moisture as a potential problem. Then we ended up taking a bunch of the boards down to bare wood, priming them with Peel Bond and recoating them. Most painting companies will NOT do this for you. We took care of it for free because we felt that we should have caught it on the first time through.

We used Benjamin Moore's Aura Exterior paint in the Low Lustre sheen. It did a good job of blending in where we had to patch and touch up, which is a rare quality. However, we had one pretty significant problem with the product. It's happened multiple times with Aura. The temperature dropped and the humidity came up for a couple days during the project. This lead to strange drying problems. Aura is so thick and dries quickly so when the humidity crept up and the temp was low, the base of the painted dried more quickly than the surface, leaving it with a tacky underside but a wet surface. This made for a coating that wouldn't dry evenly and was impossible to touch up until completely dried.

Bottom line - Aura can be great but is tricky in bad weather.