Painting porches and stairs..

[Brady]

We bought this house about 6 months ago. The previous owners had painted the back stairs/rail (little deck, like so little only my 2 year old can squeeze in), and the front stairs and small landing to the door were all painted this blue color.. I think they were trying to match the shutters or something.

Anyways, they looked decent when we bought it.. but over the winter the paint peeled away and they are in serious need of painting.

Can I just paint over this paint? Or do I need to scrape/prime/paint to do this? Oh how I wish they had just stained the wood to begin with! I can't even just touch it up as I have no idea the original color and will have to take a best guess and ultimately paint everything to make it uniform.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

[Hello Kitty]

In my experience with exterior painting, you're better off scraping and sanding it down, and then starting over with a good quality exterior paint, especially if it is peeling..

Last year, I touched up some wood exerior windows, with good paint, but the old 'bad' paint peeled away over the winter, making it look worse. It will be a PITA, but I plan to do it right over the summer.

[fuzzy]

You shouldn't need to prime, but yes, you'll need to scrape. And I hear ya about wishing people would just use stain -- we have a 60 foot long by 8 foot wide porch on the front of our house that I have to re-paint AGAIN this year. UGH.

[MrsBeckyLP]

I don't know a whole lot, but if you scrape and sand (which would ideally remove all remnants of the paint) couldn't you just stain the wood then instead of painting it again? Otherwise I see this happening year after year, especially since it's stuff you walk on daily.