Painting wood shingles and cedar siding: paint, stain, and the patience it takes

Wood shingles and cedar siding can be painted, stained or finished with a solid-color stain, and each choice ages differently. Paint gives the most color control but forms a film that can peel; stain soaks in and fades gradually. Whichever you pick, the lasting result comes from dry, clean, sound wood, primer on bare spots, and coating every edge and end.

Shingled houses show up across Grosse Pointe and Metro Detroit, from Cape Cods with shingled gables to Colonial Revival houses with cedar walls above brick. They are lovely, and they ask more of a painter than flat siding does. Here’s how to think about the finish and what a careful job looks like.

Should you paint or stain wood shingles?

There are three common routes, and the trade-offs are real.

• Paint sits on the surface as a film. It offers the widest range of colors and the most uniform look, and it protects well while it’s intact. The cost of that film is that once it fails, it peels or blisters, and the next repaint begins with scraping.
• Solid-color (opaque) stain is a middle path. It hides the wood’s color like paint but is thinner and tends to wear down gradually instead of peeling. Repainting it later is usually simpler, though it isn’t a fit over a surface with heavy, failing paint.
• Semi-transparent stain soaks into the wood and lets the grain show. It is the most natural look, it fades with weather, and it needs maintenance coats sooner. It isn’t a fit for shingles that are already painted.

The direction you can go depends heavily on what’s there now. Bare or lightly weathered cedar can go any of the three ways. Shingles that carry old paint can usually be repainted or covered with a solid stain once the old coating is sound, but they can’t go back to a see-through finish without stripping, which is rarely practical on a whole house.

Check the label of whichever product you choose for what it can go over, how many coats it needs and how long to wait between them. That label is the real rule book.

Why do shingled houses take so much more patience?

A flat lap-siding wall has one face and one bottom edge per board. A shingled wall has hundreds of small pieces, each with a rough face, a ragged bottom butt, gaps on either side and an overlap beneath. Coating it properly means getting finish into all of those places, not just across the visible faces.

Rough-sawn or split shingles also soak up coating unevenly. Dense areas take little; open, thirsty grain drinks it. The first coat on bare shingles can look thin and patchy on purpose, because it’s doing the work of sealing the wood. Rushing to get a solid look in one pass is how thin spots, skips and “holidays” (missed areas) end up in the final wall.

That’s why a careful shingle job is slow in a way that looks, from the sidewalk, like very little is happening. The time goes into brushing coating into texture and reaching edges that you only notice when they’re missed.

How is a shingled wall prepared?

As with any exterior, the prep is where the lifespan of the finish is decided. Our guide to why prep is the paint job makes the general case, and on shingles it breaks into several checks.

1. Look for rot and damage first. Probe the lower courses, the shingles near window sills and below roof lines, and any area near the ground. Soft, spongy or crumbling shingles are replaced, not painted. Split ones are replaced or fastened.
2. Deal with mildew. Cedar in shaded, damp spots grows dark mildew that paint will not hide. It has to be cleaned off; our guide to mildew on siding before painting explains why.
3. Clean gently. Washing removes dirt and chalk, but force can drive water behind the shingles and raise the wood fibers. Old shingles are rinsed with restraint and given time to dry fully before anything is applied.
4. Remove loose and failing coating. Peeling paint and loose fibers are scraped and sanded back to a sound edge. Coating over loose material just delays the failure.
5. Deal with gray, weathered wood. The sun-silvered surface of bare cedar is a loose layer of broken-down fiber. A coating that grips it will lift with it, so it needs to be cleaned back to sound wood.
6. Fill and caulk with care. Nail holes and small splits are filled. Where shingles meet trim, corners or flashing, a paintable sealant goes in. The gaps between shingles themselves are not caulked shut; those joints need to breathe and shed water.

Does bare cedar need primer?

If you’re painting, yes. Bare wood is thirsty and varies from board to board, and a primer made for exterior wood seals it so the topcoat dries evenly and bonds. Cedar adds one wrinkle: it contains natural oils and tannins that can bleed through light paint as brown or tan stains, especially when the wood gets wet. Cedar is often primed with a stain-blocking exterior primer for that reason; read the label for what the primer is rated for.

Some points to check on any priming plan:

• Prime bare wood the same day it’s exposed if possible. Left open to rain and sun, it weathers quickly.
• Spot-prime sanded and scraped areas at minimum. On a weathered, bare wall, prime the whole surface.
• Allow the dry time on the label before topcoating, especially in humid weather.

Stains work differently: they’re applied directly to bare wood, and the label will say whether any sealer or conditioner comes first. Stain over old stain or paint is a different matter, so check the label before assuming it will take.

What are end grain and back-brushing, and why do they matter?

End grain is the cut end of the wood, where the fibers open like a bundle of straws. On a shingle, that means the bottom butt of every piece. End grain sucks up water far faster than the face, so these edges are where moisture enters, where rot starts and where paint fails first.

A careful painter makes sure every butt gets a full coat, primer included. It’s easy to cover the visible face of a shingle and leave its underside edge thin, since that edge is hard to see and awkward to reach. It’s also the part of the wall that’s wet most often.

Back-brushing means working the coating into the surface with a brush after it’s applied, rather than leaving it to sit on top. On rough shingles it pushes finish into the texture, fills the pores and edges, and evens out the coat. It’s slower than just applying the coating and moving on, and it’s one of the clearest signs of how carefully a shingled wall was handled.

Look for it in the result. A properly worked wall has finish visible down in the edges and gaps and no bare slivers peeking out below a shingle’s lip.

When is the right time to paint or stain shingles in Michigan?

Wood needs to be dry. Shingles hold moisture long after a rain and slower still after a wet spring, and coating damp wood is a common route to blistering and early peeling. The general window for exterior work in this region runs roughly from late spring to early fall, with temperature and dew point mattering as much as the calendar. Our guide to the best time to paint an exterior in Michigan covers it.

For shingles, a few additional checks apply:

• Cedar on a north or lake-facing wall stays wet longest and needs the most drying time. Houses that sit close to the water deal with more moisture; see our guide on painting lakefront homes.
• Don’t coat shingles in direct, blazing sun, which can dry the surface too fast and prevent proper bonding.
• Don’t start a wall that will see dew or rain before the coating has set. Check the label for dry-to-rain times.

What about lead paint on older shingled houses?

Homes built before 1978 may contain lead-based paint, and scraping and sanding shingles is exactly the work that disturbs it. The EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting (RRP) rule requires certified firms and lead-safe work practices for paid work that disturbs painted surfaces in pre-1978 homes, more than 20 square feet outside. The EPA’s RRP program page explains the details, and our guide to lead paint in older homes covers testing.

What does a careful shingle job look like when it’s finished?

A few things to check on the finished wall:

• Coverage reaches the bottom edge of every shingle, and no bare wood shows below the lip.
• The finish is the same on the rough and smooth shingles, with no dull, thirsty patches.
• There’s no brown bleed-through on pale colors, especially under eaves and near window trim.
• Joints against trim, corners and flashing are neatly sealed and painted.
• Drips, runs and pooled coating in the gaps have been brushed out.
• Nothing has been caulked shut that needs to drain.

The same standard applies to all of our stages of a flawless finish. Guiffre’s works through the steps on its process page, painting with Sherwin-Williams, with Bob and Bobby on every project and a final walkthrough with touch-ups. The plain-English written scope lays out what’s planned for each part of the house, shingled walls included. To see how that fits an exterior, visit our exterior painting page.

Once a shingled wall is finished, a yearly look at the lower courses and the north side keeps small problems from growing; our exterior paint maintenance checklist is a good starting point.

Questions

Planning an exterior project?See how Guiffre’s prepares and paints exteriors built for Michigan weather.→