What Counts as an Older House
Cloudland takes on historical restoration for homes that are more than fifty years old: Colonials, Victorians and seaside cottages. No two of those houses fail the same way, but they tend to share a few things. There are layers of old paint, plaster walls where a newer house would have drywall, and a finish history that nobody wrote down.
A house that has stood for a century has been painted many times. Every coat adds thickness, softens the profile of the trim a little more, and buries whatever went on first. Plaster behaves differently from drywall too. It cracks along old stress lines, and a patch has to be built up and feathered by hand before it disappears under paint. Treat those walls like new construction and every old repair shows through the next coat.
Ray Sola has painted houses since 1985, and he spent time working in a local paint store, so the talk about paints and stains starts from real experience. He formed Cloudland in 2004 and built the crew around seasoned painting professionals, which is the right mix for a house that needs patience more than speed.
Plaster, Paint and Lead Together
On a restoration, plaster repair, paint and lead-safe practice are one job, not three. Cloudland has repaired plaster in churches with vaulted ceilings, and the same crew that did that work is the one that comes to your parlor. One estimate covers the repair and the finish, so there is no gap between trades and no second schedule to juggle.
A house built before 1978 may carry lead in its paint, and the older the house, the better the odds. Cloudland's own page puts it plainly: “every one of our staff are Lead-Safe Certified, including our summer interns.” That means nobody on the crew has to be kept away from an older house, and the scraping and sanding that make up much of a restoration are done the lead-safe way.
Before the work starts you get written information about lead, so the process is on paper and not just a promise. Defne Veral, a Google reviewer, said Ray is knowledgeable about codes and about how to remove lead paint and use VOC-free paints. For an older home that is the conversation worth having first.
A Dozen Visits and Counting
Henry L. owns a house built in 1914. He says he has worked with Ray on it over a dozen times since 1995, which was before the company carried the Cloudland name. In his words, each time Ray and the crew talk over the repairs the house needs and the best way to make them, and then they do the work.
That pattern is how an old house is actually kept up. It is never finished. A porch gets attention one year, a plaster ceiling the next, the clapboards a few seasons later. The painter who has seen the house before already knows where the water gets in and which window casings have been patched twice.
Cloudland works across New Haven County, including the shoreline towns of Branford, Guilford and Madison and inland towns like Cheshire, Wallingford and Middletown. Every job starts with a free, no-obligation written estimate, and on big houses the estimate is broken into written segments so you can see where each part of the cost lands.
