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A guy at Totem told me I was using the wrong paint for Edmonton winters
I was at Totem picking up supplies for a fence repair and an older guy in the aisle told me my exterior paint was meant for dry climates, not our freeze-thaw cycles. He pointed me to a flexible acrylic instead and said it would stop the peeling I kept getting every spring. Has anyone else switched paint types after getting a tip from a stranger at the hardware store?
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kim81918d ago
I'm gonna push back on that "five bucks" thing @williams.kim, because I bet that guy has painted way more fences than he's fixed. Or maybe he's done plenty of both. But the real thing I want to gently correct is the idea that any random stranger at Totem knows what they're talking about. My dad used to tell me that the guys wandering the aisles at hardware stores are either retired contractors who actually know their stuff, or dudes who just like to look like they do. The flexible acrylic tip sounds legit though, because our freeze-thaw cycles here are brutal and regular paint turns into potato chips by March. I switched to a similar product last year after my neighbor's brother-in-law (who paints for a living) told me the same thing, and sure enough, zero peeling this spring. So that stranger probably wasn't wrong, but I'd still double check his advice with someone who's actually got paint on their boots.
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casey_harris18d ago
That "potato chips by March" line is pretty accurate actually, that's exactly what mine looked like before I switched. But I gotta push back on the idea that guys wandering hardware aisles are either retired pros or just poseurs, there's a whole middle group of guys who've painted their own house twice and picked up a few legit tricks along the way. The flexible acrylic is definitely the right call though, I made the same switch and my fence actually looks decent come spring instead of flaking off like a bad sunburn.
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