TomR wrote:
Dottie wrote:
I am going to hire a painter to paint the outside of my house. . . . ,
Just wondered what you'll thought. This is a big expense so I don't
want to screw up. Thanks.

Here's a good website about painting a house:
http://www.howtopaintahouseright.com/

It's by a guy named John Burbridge and the videos are worth watching.

He also has a paperback book, "Watching Paint Dry", that I bought and
have read 2/3 of so far. It's an easy read, and the first part of
the book was particularly interesting to me -- it's about how
exterior house painting jobs get botched up. He was on a painting
crew whose job it was to go back to botched house painting jobs to
"fix" them as part of the guarantee from the original painting
company. The main problem, in most cases, was improper cleaning,
scraping, and preparation of the house before painting it. There is
also a website called
http://www.askthebuilder.com/ and his main pitch in all of his
articles about exterior house painting is good preparation and, in
particular, actually physically washing the house with a brush and
not just pressure washing the exterior.

(The second half of the Watching Paint Dry book is a little less
interesting to me since it is mostly about painting stories and
personality issues between painters, and between painters and bosses,
on painting job sites.).
I don't know the answer regarding which paint would be best for you
to use.
I got estimates one time for painting the exterior of a house that I
own (not stucco), and the estimates ranged from $3,500 plus paint to
$15,500. So, get a number of estimates.

Sorry about the formatting and extra spacing between the lines in my
original reply. I don't know why my posts sometimes show up that way, but
it usually is when I include cut-and-paste website links.