It was a good deal of work this year, as we are selling Treasure Island, so we wanted to do the house completely--to give the new owners a number of years off. Normally, we paint one wall a year on the ground floor, then the top floor in another year, and all the trim in yet another year. This leaves us with just a few days out of "vacation mode" every season.
The walls are power washed at 1700 lbs/sq. inch and then hand sanded, then a good coat of solid oil stain in Heritage Blue is applied. The trim takes power washing, hand sanding, and a prime coat of Z prime followed by a finish coat of high gloss oil in an eggshell hue.
One of the ironies is that--with the redwood siding--we probably would have never needed to paint it at all! I have a friend in California whose barn is sided with redwood--it is in its one hundredth year.
