Exterior Painting in the West Denton Residential Historic District

Exterior painting in the West Denton Residential Historic District means repainting Craftsman bungalows, Minimal Traditional cottages and their detached garages with prep suited to old wood and early siding. The National Register listing adds no paint rules. Safe Choice Painting checks whether your house also sits in a city historic district, identifies the siding, and plans the work from there.

What the district is

The National Park Service listed the West Denton Residential Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places on February 11, 2021. Its boundary runs roughly along West Hickory Street, Panhandle Street, Carroll Boulevard and Ponder Avenue, about half a mile west of the Courthouse Square and just northeast of the University of North Texas.

The nomination, which the City of Denton posts on its website, counts 483 buildings, 377 of them contributing. Most went up between 1890 and 1957, and home building peaked from 1923 to 1929. Craftsman houses are the largest group, at about 35 percent of all buildings, and Minimal Traditional houses make up about 13 percent. Detached garages are about a quarter of the buildings. In 1924 alone, 31 Craftsman homes were built near the school campus on the north side.

National Register listing and city rules

These are two different things. The National Park Service says listing on the National Register places no federal restrictions on a private owner; you may do with the property as you wish within local laws and ordinances. So the listing by itself does not set your colors.

City rules come from Denton's local historic districts, which are created by ordinance. Two of them are in this part of town:

• Oak-Hickory, with the large Queen Anne and Period Revival houses along Oak and Hickory. It has written color and masonry rules; see our Oak-Hickory exterior painting page.
• West Oak Area, which Section 4.9.6 of the Development Code places between Oak Street, Thomas Street, Houston Place and Jagoe Street. As published, that section says a Certificate of Appropriateness is not required for exterior painting there, suggests colors from paint makers' preservation palettes, and says brick that has never been painted is not to be painted except in listed cases.

If you are not sure which applies to your address, the city's historic preservation staff can tell you before colors are chosen. Other city steps for exterior work are on its Certificate of Appropriateness page.

Craftsman bungalows

The nomination describes the district's Craftsman houses as having prominent front gables, lower front porches, tapered wood columns on brick piers, and often brackets under the eaves and exposed rafter tails. Those details are what make a repaint take time:

• Rafter tails and brackets are scraped, sanded and primed one by one.
• Tapered columns are often wrapped wood; soft spots at the base are pointed out.
• Brick piers under the columns stay unpainted unless they were painted before.
• Porch ceilings and railings are part of the job when you want them done.

A typical Craftsman color plan uses three colors: a body color, a trim color for the eaves, columns and window casings, and an accent for the front door or sashes.

Siding: wood, brick, stucco and shingles

The nomination lists wood, brick, stone, stucco and asbestos among the district's principal exterior materials, and notes that Minimal Traditional houses were often re-sided with asbestos shingles. So the first step is to identify the siding.

• Wood weatherboard gets scraping, sanding, priming of bare spots and two coats of exterior acrylic.
• Shingles that may contain asbestos are not sanded, scraped hard or pressure washed. They are cleaned gently, primed where needed and painted.
• Stucco and stone are cleaned and coated with masonry products, or left as they are.

See siding painting in Denton for the general siding process.

Garages and outbuildings

With about 123 garages counted in the district, many lots have a detached garage at the back, and some have carriage houses or other outbuildings. These usually get the same colors as the house. Their wood is often more weathered because nobody looks at it, so we check doors, trim and the bottoms of the siding closely.

Rot and repair

Old wood holds up well when it stays painted. Where it does not, wood rot repair covers trim, siding, fascia and soffits: soft wood is cut out, filled or replaced in kind, primed and painted. Rot in porch framing, structural posts or sills is pointed out, and we suggest you bring in a framing contractor before we paint.

Related pages

The district's south end overlaps the Oak-Hickory area; for its rules, start with the Oak-Hickory page. For historic houses elsewhere, see historic home exterior painting.

Nearby

• Exterior painting in Denton, TX
• Painting in Denton, TX
• Exterior painting
• Exterior painting in Denton's Oak-Hickory Historic District