Most people see a rustic, weathered old barn, its red coat faded by sun and wind, its paint chipped in a perfect mosaic of time and history, and they think, How beautiful.

I look at the same barn and think, Needs paint.

One evening last summer, I saw such a barn. I was walking in a field with some friends and their dog on land I know well. We stood in the green grass taking in the view as swallows dipped and weaved through the dusk. The barn stood at the far end of the field soaking in the last of the light, assuming the sense of purpose old structures often do—a purpose larger than that for which they were built. Its silhouette seemed to outline the passage of time itself, a symbol of endurance and ingenuity and utility.

And yet, man, did it need a coat of paint.

Landing on the right color for a barn is trickier than you'd think.

Barns, the simplest of wooden structures, need paint. Each time you seal a barn with a solid coat of good paint, you buy it ten years of life, I say. And yet, as easy as it would seem to paint a barn—four flat, red sides, some white trim if it's fancy—with the wrong equipment it can be a chore.

I've worked at this magazine for nearly three decades and I can't remember a story about painting a barn. And it's probably been twenty years since we did a major painting story at all. It was time.

We talked to the owner, said we wanted to paint his barn. He didn't resist. I and a small team immediately inspected the structure and laid out a plan. The thing needed window sashes, repair carpentry, and some general sprucing up. We'd do the paint job and enough repair carpentry to achieve a nice look. Everything else was the owner's problem.

Landing on the right color for a barn is trickier than you'd think.

Too light a red and in the wrong combination of light, a barn can appear orange or, worse, pink. To get the color just right, I took pictures of the barn in early morning, afternoon, and at dusk on my iPhone 7—this is a good idea to do before visiting your paint dealer. We settled on Benjamin Moore's Country Redwood in a high-quality Regal Select Exterior, a high-quality all-acrylic coating that provides a much thicker film than a typical coating.

With the paint lined up, I set out to find the best new tools on the market—there had to have been some improvements in the past twenty years. You don't want to mess with homeowner-grade equipment, especially on big jobs. Good tools pay for themselves on the first job and help you complete the work in half the time.

We selected Purdy Power Lock extension poles in two sizes, equipped with eighteen-inch-wide frames and a Purdy Marathon roller cover with a 3/8-inch nap. Most of us are familiar with applying paint with a nine-inch roller. You can't believe how fast painting goes when you use products like this. The paint goes on more than twice as fast.

Some parts of the barn were not accessible with hand tools. While the north, east, and west are shiplapped vertical cedar siding, the south side is weather-beaten board-and-batten. Worse, the rafter tails are exposed on the north and south faces, and many of the bays are studded like a cactus with nails poking out in every direction, just waiting to bite your hand or snag a roller.

The answer was simple: We would spray as much of the barn as possiblae.

We were ready to paint—but the barn was dirty, one of its main doors was off its hinges, and the bottom edges of all the doors looked like they had been chewed by rats.

So I did what any sensible editor would do, I called Richard Romanski, contributing editor and Guy Who's Good at Everything, and asked if he could lend a hand. "That's more work than two guys can handle," Richard said. "Call Andy."

Andy Northshield is worth mentioning for a couple of reasons: He's a full-time firefighter whose dad was an industrial-arts teacher, so he's incredibly handy. He's also a combat-hardened Marine. I called him up and described the job. He said only: "I'll be there."

Henry Hung

It goes like this: You wash from the bottom up to remove dirt and mildew. Then rinse from the top down. At the same time, you scrape and pressure-wash to remove loose paint. If needed, you might have to do a second light rinse to remove dust from any scraping and sanding. Next, prime bare areas. If, even after washing, the paint is severely weathered and coated with a dusty layer of paint pigment (called chalk by paint pros), you apply a coating of oil-based alkyd primer because it bonds tenaciously, even through chalk. Finally, when the preparations are complete, you apply a latex topcoat.

Andy went to work pressure-washing one side of the barn. Richard and I went about spot-fixing the rotted doors. Barn doors are heavy, and it takes two guys to lift them off their hinge pins. In no time, we were soaked with sweat, so I walked over to Andy to take a break. I was astonished when I saw how far he had progressed. The paint was so weak that the pressure washer hadn't just blasted off the loose chips, it had removed most of the paint from the entire barn. Andy was soaked with spray-back and his safety goggles were caked with red. "I guess we'll be priming a lot more of the barn than I thought," I said. Andy shrugged. Richard had ambled over with a cup of coffee and a cider doughnut.

"Yep," he said.

Many of the bays are studded like a cactus with nails poking out in every direction, just waiting to bite your hand or snag a roller.

(We did find, in the pachysandra, the hand-forged hinge pin that was missing from a broken door. These crude things look like a giant square-cut nail with a pin forged into its top. You hammer it into a barn timber and then the other part of the hinge—attached to the door—slides on top of it.)

The rest of the barn went pretty much in that fashion. We blasted it clean—so much that at times I was worried Andy was going to blast the whole thing to the ground. But of course, this old barn was a lot stronger than a pressure-washer. In more than a century and a half, it had housed all manner of tools and farm implements, bales of hay, livestock (we think), children's toboggans and bicycles and army helmets, two Triumphs and an MG in various stages of repair, lawn tractors, table saws, extended families of mice and chipmunks, and a large collection of clay planting pots belonging to the current owner's wife. It was a living barn, a wondrous barn, and we were simply helping it continue to serve, the way other small groups of friends probably did in the 1970s and fifties and thirties and aughts and for decades before that.

Henry Hung

With the washing and scraping on the siding complete, we turned our attention to the rafter tails and trim. We were relieved to find that once the weak top layer of paint was removed from these surfaces, the underlying paint was sound. So we didn't have to prime them, we simply sprayed the topcoat. Then we painted the red siding below, by both brush and spray, getting as close to the rafter tails as we dared. And we did dare. With practice, we managed to get the paint within a fraction of an inch. Some parts of the barn were so high off the ground (more than twenty feet) that you couldn't tell if there was a narrow gap where one coat of paint stopped and the other began. Still, we carefully went over the structure and touched up by hand and cut in to a clean, crisp line everywhere. We did a similarly meticulous job painting the flat black metal hinges and door hasps. Barns deserve respect.

One fine autumn morning, the barn job was complete. Since we never spent a full day on the project but rather worked on it as time permitted between other tasks, it's hard to say how long it all took. Several days, would be my inexact estimate.

But it was satisfying. The barn looked proud, and we had given ourselves a first-rate education in how to paint big structures. Orange maple leaves drifted down and made a fine sight in contrast with the red and white backdrop.

I stepped back, took it in and thought, That's beautiful.

Henry Hung

This story appears in the April 2017 issue of Popular Mechanics.