Painting Monona's mid-century houses, inside and on the lake side

What we do in Monona

• Refinishing mid-century kitchen cabinets in Monona

  Built around the kitchens of the city's postwar boom: flat slab doors that show every brush mark, soffits over the uppers, rooms updated one piece at a time, period pulls, and whether refinishing still makes sense when a bigger remodel might come in a few years.

• Painting paneled dens, textured ceilings and flush doors in Monona

  For dens and rec rooms from the 1950s and 1960s. It covers solid boards versus sheet paneling and the primer each needs, the EPA's caution about textured ceilings that haven't been tested, flush doors with thin veneer faces, and colors from the period that suit a paneled wall.

• Monona decks, garage doors and front doors after a lake winter

  What a long lake winter leaves on a ranch or split level: wood garage doors worn along the bottom edge, trim paint that cracks every spring, decks under snow, shovels and ice melt, and front door colors that give a long, low facade a focal point.

Monona homes at a glance

Inside a house from the boom years

Start with the trim and doors. Plenty of mid-century houses kept their original casings and doors, and under today's color there's often oil-based paint from the first owners. New water-based paint holds on that only after cleaning, scuff sanding and a bonding primer, and on a repaint that prep is most of the work.

The rooms carry other markers of the era: paneling in a den or basement, texture on a ceiling, slim casings and flat doors. Paneling paints well with a stain-blocking primer. A textured ceiling is another matter, because the EPA lists textured coatings among the places asbestos can turn up and says you usually can't tell by looking, so have an untested one tested before anyone paints or scrapes it. The Monona interior page goes into both.

Kitchens from the boom tend to be compact, with slab doors and a soffit above the uppers, and most have been updated at least once. Refinishing keeps that layout and gives every door one finish, which is why refinishing Monona's mid-century kitchens spends its time on slab doors and mixed remodels.

At the five to ten years a coat on an interior wall usually lasts, by the numbers in our post on how long paint lasts, a room from 1963 may have been painted half a dozen times. If the dining room is first on your list, our guide to dining room paint colors helps with a room used mostly in the evening, and if a later owner added crown molding, painting crown molding covers the order and the ladder work.

The side of the house that faces the water

Lake Monona has about 13 miles of shoreline, and Madison holds three sides of it; Monona has the southeast. On a lakefront lot, the side facing the water is often the busiest in summer, with the deck, the door out to it and the steps down the yard, and it's usually the most exposed side too.

The Forest Products Laboratory, the federal wood research lab in Madison, says the parts of a house fully exposed to sun and rain are the first to deteriorate. Deck boards lie flat, where water sits and sunlight hits squarely, and the lab's deck guidance favors penetrating stains over paint or solid-color stain, with pigment shielding the wood from the sun.

The door that opens onto the deck takes the same weather plus hands, boots and wet towels, so its edges and sill tend to wear first. Then comes winter: the lake is typically frozen for about 107 days, and every freeze and thaw works water into cracks in old paint. We take care of those decks, doors and trim; whole-house siding isn't something we paint.

Wet boards can't take stain, so work on the water side waits for a dry stretch, and a deck under trees may need longer to dry than one in full sun. The Monona deck and door page covers winter wear, ice melt and garage doors, and our deck staining and exterior page lists everything we do outside.

Farmland and summer homes until 1938

Before Monona incorporated as a village on August 29, 1938, the area was mostly farmland and summer homes. The boom came next: during the 1950s the population more than tripled, from 2,544 to 8,178. The village opened a community center and swimming pool in 1963, the same year as its median home in today's Census estimates, and became a city in 1969.

The land holds much older history as well. The Tompkins-Brindler Mound Group in Woodland Park is a reminder that people lived along this shore long before the subdivisions.

Three square miles, mostly built by 1980

Monona covers about 3.35 square miles, nearly all of it land, with Madison on almost every side and the lake along the rest. Most of its building was done early, and the Census shows it: only about 21% of its homes have been built since 2000, and just 11% date from 1980 to 1999.

Not every mid-century home here sits on its own lot. A little over half of Monona's homes are detached single-family houses, and about 54% are lived in by their owners, so apartments, condos and rented homes make up a real share of the city. The prep for a 1960s room is the same whoever holds the deed.

Other towns we serve

• Madison
• Waunakee
• Middleton
• Verona
• Fitchburg
• Sun Prairie
• DeForest
• Windsor
• McFarland
• Cross Plains
• Dane

Helpful guides

• How long paint lasts, on the wall and in the can
• Dining room paint colors, from deep and moody to warm and light
• Painting crown molding: the color, the order and the ladder