LESLIE: Now we’re going to take a call from Florida where Mike has the infamous nail pops.
Mike, what’s going on?
MIKE: Thank you for taking my call.
LESLIE: You’re so welcome. Where are you seeing them?
MIKE: We bought the house in ’01 and painted it and shortly – about a year later, I started noticing these nail heads rusting through the paint. And so I’ve looked at those for about a year and a half, two years, and started asking different people how to repair that and I’ve been instructed to either sand them off and get a nail drive and drive them through and renail the boards.
TOM: So is your concern with the rusty nail tips or is your concern with nail pops?
MIKE: Well, what I need to do is know how to repair them. They’re rusted nails and there’s probably 200 of them on the siding.
LESLIE: Oh, my God. Oh, they’re exterior.
MIKE: Yes. Yes, I’m sorry. It’s outside of the house.
TOM: Oh, OK. Alright. We thought you were talking about interior nails.
MIKE: No, this is on the siding, on the outside.
TOM: OK. Boy, it sounds like they used the wrong kind of nails here, Leslie.
LESLIE: Yeah, because normally an exterior nail or an exterior screw are really made to stand up to the conditions and not rust and not wear.
TOM: What kind of siding do you have, Mike?
MIKE: I don’t know the name of it. It’s not – the house was built in ’95 and it wasn’t the GP that was …
TOM: It’s not the composite siding. But it’s wood siding? Because you say it’s coming through paint. What kind of siding is painted? You have wood siding that’s been painted?
MIKE: Yes.
TOM: Hmm. Well, here’s what you’re going to need to do. You are going to need to sand and I think you’re going to need to prime. If you prime with an oil-based primer – not a water-based; an oil-based …
LESLIE: You should cover that rust no problem.
TOM: Right, it should seal the rust in and it won’t come through again. But when you use latex paint, the rust just leaps right through it. You’ve got to use an oil-based primer if you want to cover a rust stain, Mike.
MIKE: So if I oil-base – sand it, oil-base prime it, and then I can do a regular latex paint over that?
TOM: Correct.
MIKE: OK, OK.
TOM: You could do that. Yeah. I would use like a KILZ oil-base.
MIKE: OK. That’s great. That’s what I needed to know. Thank you very much.
TOM: You’re welcome. Thanks for calling us at The Money Pit.
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