Wood Trim Can Show Hail Damage That Looks Like Old Paint

Most homeowners walk the house after a hailstorm looking at the roof, the gutters and the siding. Window trim and corner boards usually get a quick glance, if they get one at all. Wood trim sits at a height where hail that has bounced off the roof or come down the wall can still have force, and its painted surface can break in ways that look like hail even when the cause is years of weather. The question this page answers is how to tell the two apart before you pay for a repaint, a board replacement or a line in a claim file.

Storm and hail

Hail on painted wood usually shows as a round or slightly oval dent where the paint has broken. The center is often a small crater with bare wood showing. Fresh hits on wood tend to leave bright, clean wood at the bottom of the crater, sharp paint edges around it, and crushed fibers rather than split grain. Weathered paint looks different. Its broken edges are feathered, with dirt, mildew or chalky residue worked into the crack, and the wood under the flake has gone gray. A flake that has been sitting loose for a season usually has dust under it. A flake knocked off by a stone that landed an hour earlier does not.

Hail also scatters. A storm hits a face of trim in a pattern with no order to it: a handful of dents of similar size spread across one board, with similar dents on the neighboring boards that face the same way. Weathering does not usually behave like that. It runs along the grain, opens at joints, lifts at the bottom edge of a board where water sits, and clusters near horizontal laps, sills and the places where caulk has failed. A single cracked flake on a sill tells you little. Twenty small round breaks on the south face of one window casing, spaced without order, tells you a good deal more.

Exposure matters. Storm hail in the St. Louis area usually arrives with wind, and wind drives it into the faces that point toward the storm. Check the south and west faces first, then the north and east. A casing that faces the wind can show a clear group of dents while the board beside it, sheltered by a porch roof or a shrub, shows none. If every face of the house looks equally scattered, the storm may have been heavier than a single side suggests, or something other than hail may be the cause. Photograph each face before you decide which story the house is telling.

The freeze and thaw cycle adds a second source of confusion. Water gets into the small gap behind paint at the bottom of a sill or the lower edge of a casing, freezes, and pushes the paint off over a few winters. The result is a crack that runs along the board, often in a fairly straight line, with a lifted flake of paint along it. Hail rarely makes a straight line unless it lands on a joint that was already open. If you find a crack a foot or longer, note it as age, photograph it, and keep it in the file as a separate item. A file that separates age from storm is more useful to whoever reads it later than a file that lumps them together.

Keep dated photos. Turn on the date stamp on your phone before you start, and check that the photos carry it. Shoot each face whole first, standing back far enough to show the corner, the window and the ground line. Then move in on each dent. Hold a coin or a ruler flat against the board for scale in the close shots. A close photo with no wider view invites the question of where the dent sits on the house, and a wide photo with no close view leaves the dent too small to read. Take both. Keep the originals on your phone and in cloud storage, not only as screenshots.

When the trim needs wood, not paint

Paint failure is the easy case. Hail that breaks paint without breaking the wood usually calls for filler, sanding, primer and a topcoat. The harder case is a dent where the wood has been bruised, or where broken paint has let water sit on bare grain for weeks. Press the tip of a flat screwdriver lightly into the bottom of each crater and note whether it stops firm or sinks into soft wood. Firm wood can be filled and repainted. Soft wood at the crater usually means rot has started, and rot does not stop at the spot you can see. Ask the crew to probe the same spots during the inspection and to write down what they found.

Water is the reason this matters. Once paint is broken, the next rain gets behind it, and in a St. Louis winter the next freeze turns that moisture into a split. A dent that looked minor in early summer can become a rotted section by the next spring. That is why the photo file should show each dent before any filler goes on, with the date visible, and why the notes should say whether the wood was firm or soft.

What it costs

Trim work is usually priced in two parts. The first part is the repair itself: filling dents, sanding, replacing any boards too soft to hold filler, and priming bare wood. The second is the repaint, which is often priced by the elevation rather than by the single board, because the crew has to set up ladders, mask windows and doors, scrape loose paint, and cover the full face to get an even color. Each part depends on how many linear feet of trim the house has and how many faces were hit. A single window casing and a full south elevation are very different jobs, even when the dents look similar in a photo.

Color match is a common cost driver on older houses. Paint on trim fades differently on each face, so a patch on the south side may look clearly newer than the rest of the house. A crew that repaints only the damaged boards will often leave a visible line. Some homeowners accept that. Others want the full face done so the color is even. Settle which one you want before you look at the price, because the two options can differ a lot.

A filled and painted dent costs less than a replaced board, but filler does not hold where water has already gotten behind the paint. If the wood is soft, replacement is the honest line, and it costs more because it adds material, time and a second coat. Ask for that line written separately from the repaint so you can see what each part adds to the total.

Trim repair also sits outside the roof price unless the written scope names it. A roof bid that covers the shingles, drip edge and flashing does not cover the window casings below the eave, and nobody should assume it does. If the trim belongs in your storm file, it needs its own lines, with the linear footage and the faces listed.

If you are filing a claim, the trim goes on your list of damaged items, and the claim is yours to file with your insurer. Missouri law, RSMo 407.725, bars a roofing contractor from representing or negotiating a homeowner's insurance claim, and it also bars the contractor from saying anything about paying, waiving or covering a deductible. What Keys can do is measure the trim, photograph each face, and put the measurements and photos in a written scope that you keep and take to your insurer yourself. Keys can attend the visit as the contractor while you handle your own insurer.

What to ask

Before you agree to any trim work, put these questions to whoever is quoting it, and ask for the answers in writing.

1. How many linear feet of trim is in the scope, and is each face counted separately?
2. For each dent, will the crew fill and sand it, or replace the board? Who makes that call on the day, and what do they check first?
3. Who probes the bottom of each crater, and will the result for each spot be written into the scope?
4. Which paint system is named, and does the price include primer on bare wood and the caulk at the trim joints?
5. Does the repaint cover the full elevation or only the damaged boards, and what happens to color match if it does not?
6. Who sets the ladders, protects shrubs and foundation beds, and picks up loose paint chips in the yard?
7. Will the photos be sent to you as originals with the date visible, and will the trim appear in the same photo set as the roof?

If the roof visit is already on your calendar, ask for the trim to be walked on that same visit so the roof and the trim go into one photo file and one written scope. You can call the Keys office at (314) 220-2333 to set that up.