Paint bubbling off wood beam DIY help

[Greg Bernhardt]

As you can see from the image a vertical portion of my wall (a wood beam) has developed this vertical bubbling where the paint is being rejected. It spans from the ceiling to floor. First thing I thought of was water damage, but as I chip away at the paint and get to the wood it doesn't seem like there is obvious damage, but maybe it's further in the wood? Any other reasons this is happening? Do I simply keep chipping away, then slab a bit of spackle on the plaster and repaint?

 

[fresh_42]

How young is the beam? Fresh or treated wood could gas out.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

How young is the beam? Fresh or treated wood could gas out.

Almost 100 years old :)

 

[fresh_42]

Strange. It's too late here now to consult my expert. As the bubbles are along the texture (I assume), there must be a relation. Reminds me a bit on a math joke about a correct but by no means helpful answer. Could it be, that moisture from the paint got into the cracks and dried out later than the rest, namely the surface. Now if the paint is old as well, but the bubbles are not, then it's a real puzzle.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Now if the paint is old as well, but the bubbles are not, then it's a real puzzle.

I bought the place two years ago as a foreclosure. I know the coat of paint on there now was done fairly recent from when I bought it. I don't remember seeing the bubbling when I bought it. I'm sure I'd remember it and be concerned.

 

[Evo]

Is it a large area? If not, can you sand it down, make sure it's dry, use a good primer, then re-paint?

What is on the other side of the wood?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Is it a large area? If not, can you sand it down, make sure it's dry, use a good primer, then re-paint?

9x1ish.

What is on the other side of the wood?

The outside, I think either brick or stucco.

I do have lots of cracks and bubbling in plaster walls on my first floor too I am now noticing. You can one is following a plaster seam and the other a crack. I think my summer project will be stripping several walls.

 

[BillTre]

Wood expands and contracts as it absorbs humidity. This can occur seasonally.
More of this kind of size change goes across the grain, relatively little will go the length of the grain or the wood.

I am not sure that I would call your first picture bubble rather than folding up of paint with the underlying wood has shrunk.
Bubbling I have seem has more of a rounded top (due to pressure inside the bubble) while your picture seems to show a series of peaks.

Size changes of wood framing might also explain the cracks at drywall seams if the panels are moving independently.

Where I live there are also movements of the ground as the clay soil expands when it is wet and contracts when it dries out. Depending on how you house is constructed, this kind of thing can move the whole house or parts of it.

 

[Evo]

If you were closer, I would wobble over and help, I love doing this kind of thing. When my first husband was in the Navy, we spent several years in condemned military housing that was built as temporary shelter after WWI. I'll never forget the day the bathroom wall fell off the house. I walked down to the maintenance shed and told the guy, he went to the back and came out with a box of tiles and a bucket of grout and handed them to me. I said, no, you don't understand, there is no wall to put these on. He gave me a crazy look. Locked the shed, and walked back to my hovel with me, we went inside and when we entered the bathroom and there was just a gaping hole he goes "WHAT DID YOU DO?"

My neighbor fell through her living room floor and broke her ankle.

So, it could be worse Greg.

 

[fresh_42]

I think it's due to the usual movements of wood, esp. if there are temperature or moisture differences involved. In German we say "wood works".

 

[Mark44]

9x1ish.
The outside, I think either brick or stucco.

I do have lots of cracks and bubbling in plaster walls on my first floor too I am now noticing. You can one is following a plaster seam and the other a crack. I think my summer project will be stripping several walls.

View attachment 128351 View attachment 128352

What's the material under the surface in these two images? I'm not any expert on plaster, but it seems unusual to have plaster applied directly to a wood beam. The usual substrate for plaster is wood strips (laths) and/or a kind of chickenwire mesh. I'm wondering if the wood beam in the picture in post #1 is picking up moisture from outside, causing it to expand and generate cracks on the inside surface, along the lines of what @fresh_42 said about wood "working." I don't think the moisture would necessarily be in the form of liquid water - vapor could pass though without the wood seeming to be very wet.

Another possibility that might make sense is that the humidity inside the house is a lot less than outside, which would cause moisture to migrate from the wetter side to the drier side. If you heat with wood, the humidity inside can be very low. Where I live (WA state), the humidity in the house was in the low 30% range in our coldest weather.

Since the place was a foreclosure, the bank might have hired someone to make fast, cheap repairs, which might not have included good surface prep or a good primer coat -- the result being that the paint or plaster isn't adhering well to the wood.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

while your picture seems to show a series of peaks.

Yeah that is correct

My neighbor fell through her living room floor and broke her ankle.

lol your post I know wasn't meant to be funny, but I did laugh because it sounds ridiculous

 

[davenn]

can you sand it down, make sure it's dry, use a good primer, then re-paint?

yes and ensure the surface is free of oils... natural from the wood or otherwise

Almost 100 years old :)

OK and how long ago was it painted with this current coating ?
if less than say around 5 yrs since pained then look for poorly prepared surface
if painted much longer than 5 ++ years, then the pain could be failing naturally or because of environmentDave

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I'm not any expert on plaster, but it seems unusual to have plaster applied directly to a wood beam.

The first photo is a wood support beam. The next two are plaster.

If you heat with wood, the humidity inside can be very low. Where I live (WA state), the humidity in the house was in the low 30% range in our coldest weather.

I have water rads with a boiler. The inside humidity was low 30s all winter and still is.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

OK and how long ago was it painted with this current coating ?

I'd say 2 years ago done by the flipper. Yeah I know. I am paying the price for many of the cheap fixes by the flipper.

 

[davenn]

I'd say 2 years ago done by the flipper. Yeah I know. I am paying the price for many of the cheap fixes by the flipper.

the flipper --- isn't a term I'm familiar with here in Oz

Our bathroom has similar problems, pain is peeling badly ... the landlords father repainted the ceiling 5 yrs ago but he didn't clean the old paint surface properly
the new paint was starting to peel in 12 months and then ongoing ingress of steam from the shower and the pain is a total mouldy mess

Every time I try to clean the mould off, more paint just peels offD

 

[Grinkle]

I'd blame it on the painter - probably didn't use any primer, didn't properly sand before painting, and the adhesion was poor, making your paint more susceptible to 'wood works'.

Flipper refers to the investor who bought the house, did a crappy paint job, and sold it to a physicist. ;-)

edit:

I did a little googling, latex over oil is blamed here -

https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/why-my-paint-peeling

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Flipper refers to the investor who bought the house, did a crappy paint job, and sold it to a physicist. ;-)

I'm not a physicist :)

I did a little googling, latex over oil is blamed here -

That is likely. There are many coats and certainly the first few must be oil or some older mixture.

 

[newjerseyrunner]

I grew up in a house over 100 years old and I remember that happening to paint in our house too. Old houses move around a lot, does that wall creak in the wind?

 

[Andy SV]

It looks like poor prep work. Walls can pickup oils and waxes and other stains that will inhibit paint from adhering properly.
The remedy is to strip off the bad paint and wash the walls with trisodium phosphate or borax and repaint.

 

[dlgoff]

http://consolidatedcoatingsinc.com/blog/baltimore-professional-painting/paint-peel/]If[/PLAIN] the paint was applied improperly in the first place, the evidence of this will manifest in the form of chips and peels. The surface may not have been properly cleaned before the paint was applied, or it may have been uneven, both of which cause paint to peel over time. Another possibility was that the wrong primer or paint was used, or that an incompatible coat was applied over an old one, for example, latex-based paint over oil-based paint.

bold by me

What I put in bold was my first thought. Here's a pic from http://consolidatedcoatingsinc.com/

 

[Work Hard Play Hard]

It looks to me like you have a keying (bonding) problem between the base and finish coat. If the base coat is still solid then your best option is probably a liquid key. If possible avoid using gypsum with lime and vice versa. At 100 years your wall is on the cusp and could go either way. Also don't use drywall joint compound. Besides, plaster doesn't stick to a trowel like joint compound and is much easier to use.
http://www.awci.org/cd/pdfs/9310_a.pdf

 

[Work Hard Play Hard]

I'm not sure what happened with the edit but my suggestion refers to what appears to be the plaster delamination and not the paint issue.

For the paint, is it possible the base is too "lime" hot for the paint? If so it will need to be sealed for any acrylic to work. Do a ph test on the wall and paints have a MSDS sheet which should identify their usable ph range.

 

[strangerep]

First thing I thought of was water damage, but as I chip away at the paint and get to the wood it doesn't seem like there is obvious damage, but maybe it's further in the wood?

From your photo, it looks like you've been able to gouge bits of wood away from beneath the bubbled paint? Is that right?

If so, can you follow a line of too-soft wood inwards, e.g., by scraping with a chisel or other sharp instrument? Do you eventually reach a point where the wood feels hard again?

If not, does that mean the wood felt hard everywhere and the paint was just lifting off the top?

It's really important to do a reliable differential diagnosis to pin this down, since the "solutions" in each case are very different.

 

[Dr Transport]

If your paint isn't adhering to plaster, try wiping it down with muriatic acid, then letting it dry completely. then prime and paint.

Also, is your ceiling plaster and lath?? When the cleaning lady came into the church next door to where I grew up, she found the ceiling had fallen in completely between Sunday night and Wednesday am. the building inspector came in and investigated, he found that the nails used to hold the lath to the ceiling joist had rusted thru and completely failed. This was a one hundred plus year old building, that is why I bring it up.

The best primer I have ever found is Zinsser 1-2-3, it stinks, but it adheres to everything provided you prep it well. If it is bare wood or bare plaster Kilz is almost as good and isn't as volatile.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

If not, does that mean the wood felt hard everywhere and the paint was just lifting off the top?

This is the case, the paint, which is many layers deep after 100 years, is lifting off the wood which appears to me to be in very good condition.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Hmm. Wood dynamically expands and contracts as a function of relative humidity. Higher RH = higher moisture content, MC. Most wood is planesawn, so tangential expansion/contraction, which has the largest coeffiecient of expansion, dominates. Those cracks parallel the grain and are the result of wood movement - tangentially.

FWIW - As a blanket statement, it is not correct to say that using latex coatings over oil-based coatings is always poor practice. The Forest Products Laboratory of the USDA has a series of publications based on extensive experiments.

What Greg has is most likely related to moisture differential between exterior and interior. In the US modern construction uses a moisture barrier (Example Tyvek) to limit this problem. Older construction in the US does not have a moisture barrier. So the source of the problem has more to do with the quality of exterior sheathing, or lack thereof. i.e., moisture migration, if I understood correctly.

Anyway, some of the comments in the thread do not match up with what the FPL research shows. If you have the time, browse and read some articles meant to help coating producers and the people who use the products get great results. And yes, surface prep is important, too.

Wood handbook - Wood as an Engineering Material - from FPL:
https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/products/publications/several_pubs.php?grouping_id=100

Bump around on the site and you can find all sorts of interesting papers, especially on exterior exposed surfaces.

 

[strangerep]

This is the case, [...wood hard everywhere...] the paint, which is many layers deep after 100 years, is lifting off the wood which appears to me to be in very good condition.

A telltale sign is that the bubbles in your pic seem to be following grain lines (or gum/resin lines?) in the wood. Is that right? (I can't quite tell from your pic.) You seem to have gouged out a few mm below the surface of the wood where you've scraped the paint.(?)

If they are resin lines,... well,... I learned years ago that they're a bad thing in the long term. For visible sections, I'd always dig out the resin and refill it with an epoxy. E.g., epoxy grout, or fiber glass resin thickened with fine sawdust or the ultrafine white "balloon" powder that some epoxy suppliers provide.

For 100 yr old wood you also have another phenomenon at work: the natural substances in the timber gradually oxidize over the decades, making it harden and shrink (which is why very old timber is far harder and more stable than new wood). But the gum/resin lines will probably shrink at a different rate from the cellulose in the main body of the timber.

Anyway,... before starting any serious repair work, I'd want to know what's happening on the other side of the beam. (IIUC, you can't access the other side?) You can probably buy an inexpensive moisture detector like https://www.jaycar.com.au/pocket-moisture-level-meter-for-wood-building-materials/p/QP2310 to find out if there's moisture deep inside the beam, without having to cut it. (That url is for an Australian shop, but I daresay you have similar outlets in your part of the world.) These devices are also used by termite inspectors to detect the presence of pests in wood (since their presence elevates the moisture level).

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Anyway,... before starting any serious repair work, I'd want to know what's happening on the other side of the beam.

New update, it's not a beam, but a hallow wood encasement that encloses a radiator pipe. I still don't see any sign of water damage.

 

[strangerep]

New update, it's not a beam, but a hallow wood encasement that encloses a radiator pipe. I still don't see any sign of water damage.

Oh, well that changes things completely. Now I'm wondering whether you'd be able to lever off part (or all) of the encasement, and replace with something non-timber, e.g., a piece of CFC (compressed fibre cement) sheet.

I remember in one of my bathrooms (from 3 homes ago), there was a panel in the wall to allow access to the sewer downpipe coming down from from higher apartments. The panel was made of particle board and, (even though painted), it had started to degrade in an unsightly way. So we replaced it with CFC sheet, and things were much better after that.