Sanding exterior wood walls.

[Jimbo123]

Hi, I'm a total amateur. I've just bought a 50 year old house with wooden exterior walls. The wood has weathered a bit, especially the lower parts of the walls up to about 2 metres high. There's lots of little grooves and lines in the wood, and the surface is not smooth like it is high up on the walls.

I'd like to repaint the walls, but it won't look good unless I smooth out the surfaces. As I'm getting on in years I feel stripping all the paint off first would be too hard for me (the walls are pretty high and wide). The paint currently on the walls is in not too bad condition. If I can get away with it I'd like to just sand smooth the lower parts of the walls and then just paint the entire walls. I'm not after a pro. result, just something that looks reasonably good would do me.

Can my idea of just sanding the rough parts of the walls, and then painting the entire walls get a reasonable result?

What type of sanding equipment should I use? I can't afford too many $$$.

Thanks for any assistance.

[Dave50]

I dont know about sanding the wall, sounds like a lot of work to me, I would get a scraper and maybe a wire brush and just get the flaky stuff off, the paint will get into the cracks and protect them, no need to fix the rest of the paint it should be fine!

[Jimbo123]

There's no flaky stuff or cracks on the wall. The wooden slabs (vertical) and the paint are in reasonable condition, other than the weathering of the surface of the actual wood itself. There's thousands of long vertical little grooves in the wood, that are only present on the lower parts of the walls, where the walls are more exposed to the weather compared to the upper reaches of the walls. It looks like the current paint job was done over the already weathered wood.

I live in an outback town where there's lots of dust in the air and dust storms, and the dust and filth gets trapped in the weathered grooves on the wall. By smoothing out the grooves it would greatly improve the overall appearance and also make cleaning a hundred times easier. The grooves are very tiny, and I wouldn't need to sand back deeply into the wood, maybe only 1/2mm mostly, to 1 mm at the most in a few of the more weathered areas.

I know it would be a long job going all around the house, but at least I won't need to get up on a ladder anywhere, because the weathering only affects the lower portions of the walls.

[Dave50]

can you get a water blaster, I would just clean it with that then just paint it! if the cracks are small enough the paint should fill the cracks! give it three or four good coats!

[ton]

I'm with dave50 on this one, definately the pressure washer, prep the cracks and maybe an airless sprayer could be an option, cheers.