How to Prepare Your Exterior for Lakefront Living

Nashville, Brentwood, and Franklin, Tennessee offer plenty of opportunities for lakefront living thanks to the Cumberland River and its many branches, Percy Priest Lake, as well as smaller bodies of water scattered throughout the region. These waterfront properties are valuable and highly sought after -- if you’re fortunate enough to reside in such a prime property, you probably want to do everything in your power to maintain its beauty and integrity. That said, maintaining the exterior of a waterfront home requires more preparation and effort than maintaining a home that’s far away from the water. Indeed, while living by the lake has numerous benefits, it also exposes your exterior to harsher environmental conditions such as harsh rains, sharp winds, lake effect snow, rising water levels, aggressive pests, and more. If you plan on getting the most out of your waterfront home, then you must be willing to take extra precautions to combat these elements. Let’s go over some key ways to prepare your exterior for lakefront living.

Clean Your Exterior Each Season

Every home requires a good cleaning now and then, not just for appearance’s sake, but also to clear away dirt, dust, grime, mold, and mildew. For non-waterfront homes, experts often recommend thoroughly cleaning your exterior once or twice a year. If you’re living by the lake, however, you’ll want to hire pressure washing services at least three times a year -- once per season (i.e. every three months) is often a good rule of thumb. Once you consider the various hazards that come with lakefront living, this increased cleaning frequency makes sense.

For starters, winds tend to blow harder and faster near the water due to pressure differentials between water and air. These persistent lake winds carry all sorts of debris with them, including sand, dirt, salt, and more. Before long, waterfront homes can harbor plenty of dirt and grime, not to mention moisture (a prerequisite for mold and mildew). Add to this regular rains and insects, and your exterior is bound to need a shower on the regular. Keeping your home’s exterior clean will help prevent these various contaminants from doing serious harm and brighten its appearance.

Get Used to Making Minor Repairs

While keeping up with seasonal pressure washing and/or scrubbing will reduce the risk of breaches, mold infestation, and more, the forces of the lake will eventually damage portions of your exterior to varying degrees. Generally speaking, these issues should be minor, such as loosened siding boards, small fractures, and missing shingles. Still, it’s important to tackle these repairs sooner than later. Waiting too long to address small concerns can allow them to grow into bigger, more costly problems. The more familiar you are with making minor exterior repairs, such as re-caulking, replacing boards, making paint touch-ups, etc., the better off you’ll be. That said, it’s also good to have a reliable exterior home painting and repair contractor in your address book to inspect and fix up your home when you can’t do it yourself.

Work with Waterproof Coatings

All exterior house paint products are not created equal. Some paints are held to a higher overall standard than others, and certain products may also be specially designed for certain environmental scenarios. When it comes to lakefront living, you’ll want to mainly work with waterproof/water-resistant coatings for your exterior surfaces to keep those high moisture levels from degrading your property and/or entering it. In addition to using waterproof exterior paint for your home’s siding, don’t forget to use waterproof deck stain for your wooden deck or patio. Keep in mind that proper surface preparation for waterproofing (i.e. cleaning, removing peeling coatings, sanding, etc.) is necessary if you want these coatings to provide the most powerful, longest-lasting protection.

Shield Your Exterior from the Sun

Water isn’t the only factor from which you must protect your lakefront home exterior -- the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation remains a threat, too. While harsh sunlight can take a toll on all homes and buildings, waterfront properties tend to get bombarded the most due to a lack of shade. By living on the water, your home is greatly exposed to the sun at various times of day. Over time, these UV rays can cause your residential exterior painting to lose its color and peel away from the substrate. Not only that, a poorly protected and/or poorly insulated home can quickly heat up under strong sunlight (especially homes with darker paint jobs), raising your energy costs. If you want to keep your home cool in warm weather and maintain your exterior’s beauty and integrity, then opt for exterior paint products with UV-resistance. These paints behave kind of like sunscreen, reflecting rather than absorbing sunlight to mitigate its negative effects. It’s also a good idea to incorporate lighter colors for your lakefront home’s exterior for additional sun deflection.

Select a Suitable Siding Material for Your Waterfront Home

The siding material that encloses your home plays a major role in how well or poorly it’s protected from the elements. If you live on the water, you want to go with siding that’s highly durable, particularly against the forces of moisture, sunlight, wind, and pests. Wood siding can easily warp and rot under these conditions, and metal siding (i.e. aluminum) can quickly rust. As such, exterior experts often recommend either brick siding or fiber-cement (i.e. Hardiplank) siding for waterfront properties. While brick will erode over time, it can take decades before it shows any real signs of wear and tear, as long as you perform regular maintenance. Of course, brick siding can be expensive, so fiber-cement is often a desirable alternative, offering comparable levels of durability and far more customization options at a fraction of the cost.

Storm Windows and Doors Are Solid Investments

Your windows and doors are essential parts of your house exterior, too, and they’re particularly vulnerable to harsh waterfront conditions. Investing in storm or impact windows, shutters, and doors is an effective way to prevent wind and rain from bombarding these features. These protective additions also provide increased insulation and noise reduction so you can enjoy your lakefront home even more and save money on energy costs.

Long-Lasting Lakefront Living

For most people, the many benefits of living on the water greatly outweigh the risks of harsher environmental conditions and their exterior implications. Still, if you wish to enjoy your lakefront property for a long time and keep repair and renovation costs low, it pays to prepare your home and keep up with routine maintenance. There’s no doubt that doing this can be a lot of work and induce plenty of stress. Fortunately, you can count on the experts at Nash Painting to prepare, improve, repair, and restore your lakefront home in Nashville, Franklin, or Brentwood, TN.

To learn more about us, our services, and our values, call us at 615-829-6858 today!