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 Here are photos from our first test painting of the exterior raked wood shingles in August 2006.  Seventy years of paint have taken its toll on the raked grooves in the shingles.  We tried wire brush, nylon brush and pressure washer.  Didn't try any chemical strippers.  We found the best approach was to wet the wall down with a hose, scrub vertically with a nylon scrub brush at the end of a five-foot handle, hose down the wall, and then start digging out each groove with a metal skewer.  Yes, scraping the paint out of each groove can be a tad time-consuming, but it doesn't damage the ridges the way all other methods seem to do.  Any old paint that holds up to the skewer, we leave.  Then we scrub the wall again with the nylon brush dipped in TSP, and wrap it up with a hose down.  

We let the wall dry for two days and then brushed on an oil-based alkyd primer to make the connection to the wood and old oil-based paint.  We erected a tent over the wall and let that dry for three days out of the sun and dust.  Finally, we went over the primer with one coat of satin latex in one of a million shades of beige.  (We had found a putty color as the lowest layer under the white which may have been a primer color.)  So now we're looking at a beige body with a dark green sash and possibly a dark reddish-brown trim color.  At this rate, that should be accomplished within 20 years.

Click on a photo to get a larger image.  Hover pointer to get a description of the picture.  Photos are in chronological order from top to bottom:

Bernadette picking paint with a skewer (1383664 bytes)Scraped wall area ready for primer (386276 bytes)Dave priming wall (377416 bytes)

Primed wood shingle (1353184 bytes)Dave putting on latex top coat (1387766 bytes)Canvas shroud to protect paint (1391670 bytes)

Finished top coat (1322090 bytes)

 

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