Painting Over the Height Marks? Three Things to Do First

The painter is coming Tuesday. Or you finally bought the paint. Either way there’s a column of pencil lines on the doorframe — names, dates, the year someone grew four inches — and it’s in the way.

Here’s what you need to know before anything gets primed: pencil under paint is gone. Not hidden. Gone. Graphite doesn’t bleed back through latex, and the only way to get down to it is sanding, which takes it off along with the paint. The people who ask afterwards whether painted-over marks can be recovered get the same answer every time, and it isn’t a good one.

So before Tuesday, do these three things. The first two take twenty minutes and cost nothing. The third is a decision.

1. Photograph the marks with a tape measure in the shot

A photo from across the room won’t do it. You want a record someone could rebuild the chart from.

• Hook a tape measure on the floor and run it up beside the marks. It stays in every shot.
• Stand back four or five feet. Hold the phone at the height of the section you’re shooting, so the lens is square to the frame, and shoot straight on. Top, middle, bottom, overlapping.
• Daylight from the side, no flash. Then one extra shot with a lamp raking across the frame from the side — faint pencil shows up in raking light when it disappears under flat light.
• Turn off the wide-angle lens. It bends straight lines.

The detailed version, with why each step matters for scale, is in How to photograph height marks so they stay accurate.

2. Write down every mark

Photos live in a camera roll that gets replaced with the next phone. A note doesn’t. For each mark: the height from the finished floor, to the sixteenth of an inch, the name, the date, and anything else that was written beside it. Put it somewhere you’ll find it in ten years.

Now the marks exist in two places that the paint can’t touch. Everything below is optional.

3. Decide what happens to the marks themselves

You have four choices, and none of them is wrong.

Paint around them

The answer that wins most Houzz threads. Mask a clean rectangle around the column of marks with good painter’s tape, press the edges down hard, paint the rest of the frame, and pull the tape while the topcoat is still slightly wet so it doesn’t tear. You end up with a window of the old colour with the marks inside it.

It looks like exactly what it is. Some families love that; it’s the doorframe telling the truth. If you’d rather it looked deliberate, a thin painted line or a small frame around the rectangle turns a patch into a feature.

Clear-coat them and paint the rest

If the frame is bare wood or the marks are on a section you’d like to keep readable without a colour change, lock the pencil down first. Use a light spray coat of clear acrylic or a proper artist’s fixative — the stuff sold for charcoal and pencil drawings — from about a foot away. Don’t start with a brush: a brush will drag soft pencil and smear it. Once the spray is dry, a brushed coat of water-based polyurethane on top is fine. Then paint the rest of the frame up to your masked line.

Transfer them, then paint everything

If you want the frame one colour, copy the marks off first. Run a strip of kraft paper or wide painter’s tape down the frame, mark the floor line, copy each line across with a ruler and write the name and date.

If you’d rather copy the handwriting itself than just the heights, two tracing methods do that. Contact-paper tracing: stick a strip of clear contact paper over the marks, trace every line and word with a fine permanent marker, then peel it off and stick it to a length of paper backing. Carbon transfer: trace the marks onto tracing paper first, then when you want them back on the fresh paint, put carbon or graphite transfer paper behind the tracing and go over the lines again. Either way, mark the floor line on the strip so it goes back at the right height. Paint the frame. Then either transfer the marks back onto the fresh paint in pencil (yes, on new paint — it’s what the frame is for), or keep the paper strip as the record.

A tip from a UK parenting forum, where one poster remembered her own mother doing exactly this: she wrote the marks on masking tape before painting, stuck the tape back on afterwards, and re-marked from it. Cheap, and it worked a generation ago.

Have them printed life-size, then paint whatever you want

This is what we make, so take the recommendation with that in mind. You photograph the marks the way step 1 describes, tell the software the height of two of them, and it straightens and stitches the photos and calibrates them to real scale. The print is a canvas scroll with wooden hangers — their pencil lines and handwriting at the height they were made — that hangs by the newly painted frame and that you keep measuring on. It’s Keep the Marks, $79 shipped anywhere in the 50 states, and you can build the print and look at it before you decide anything.

The point of this option is that it separates the two things you’re weighing. The frame gets painted. The marks don’t go anywhere.

If the marks are in ink, not pencil

Ballpoint and especially permanent marker behave differently. They bleed through latex paint over months and show up as ghost lines. Painters block them with a shellac-based primer. This is bad news for the painter and mildly good news for you: ink marks under a coat of ordinary paint are, technically, still there. They’re still not recoverable in any way you’d want — you can’t get the names back — so do steps 1 and 2 regardless.

Getting back painted-over marks (if it’s already happened)

Sometimes people find this page a week late. Two things to try, with honest odds. Look at the frame under a strong lamp raked across the surface at a low angle, in a dark room; pencil that was pressed hard sometimes leaves a dent in the wood or the old paint that the new paint follows. You may see the lines. You won’t see the writing. And if the paint went on thin and the marks were in marker, they may ghost through on their own in a few months. That’s the full list. There isn’t a solvent trick and there isn’t a sanding trick.

If you have any older photos of the doorframe — birthdays, first days of school, the kid standing against it — those photos may have the marks in the background. Zoom in. People have rebuilt a decent chart from three years of birthday pictures.

Related

• Every way to save the height marks on your doorframe when you move
• How to photograph height marks so they stay accurate
• Starting a doorframe growth chart that survives paint, moves and time
• Questions people ask about doorframe height marks