Painting a House in NoDa

North Charlotte was started in 1903 on rolling farmland about two miles beyond the city limits of the day, planned by textile men as a self-contained industrial district. Highland Park Mill No. 3, drawn by the mill architect Stuart Cramer, went up first with worker housing across N. Davidson Street. Mecklenburg Mill opened in 1905 and put its village on Mercury Street, 37th Street and Herrin Avenue, using D. A. Tompkins house designs originally drawn for the Atherton Mill village in Dilworth. Johnston Mill followed in 1913. From 1906 the North Charlotte Realty Company developed the tract east of the two villages with larger houses aimed at middle-income buyers.

The National Register nomination puts numbers on what survived: 438 resources across 155.5 acres — three former mills, two former mill villages, a business district and a small collection of middle-class residences — with 287 of them, 66 percent, counted as contributing. Its period of significance ends in 1939, so post-war houses inside the boundary are recorded as noncontributing rather than excluded. Add two decades of townhouse and mid-rise infill plus the adaptive reuse of the mills, and a single block can carry a 1910 frame cottage, a 1950s house and a 2019 townhome side by side.

The mill housing is the part people picture, and it is unusually legible because it repeats. The nomination describes one-story frame houses in look-alike rows built to a short list of forms: single-pile side-gable houses with engaged shed-roofed front porches, plain wooden posts and brick-pier foundations; three-room T-plan houses, the Mecklenburg Mill's principal design, built mostly between 1905 and 1910 (the 1929 Sanborn map shows 39 of them in that village); two-bay gable-front triple-pile shotgun houses put up around 1910 along East 34th Street in the Highland Park No. 3 village; roughly 25 surviving hip-roofed double-pile duplexes from about 1910, some with German siding and four-over-four sash; and 1920s gable-front triple-pile duplexes with hip-roofed porches and, in the nomination's phrase, “simple bungalow-related elements.”

East of the villages the realty-company streets read differently. Along East 35th and Spencer and in the 3200 blocks of North Alexander, Yadkin and North Myers, the stock is vernacular Victorian houses, Colonial Revivals, and gable-front, hip-roofed and cross-gable bungalows from the 1920s — still mostly one story, just slightly larger than the mill houses. The practical consequence for a repaint is scale and repetition: small footprints, a lot of porch per square foot of wall, and the same trim details recurring down a whole row.

The National Register form records the district's materials as brick foundations, walls of wood and weatherboard plus brick, asphalt roofs, and metal — tin and steel — elsewhere. The nomination text fills in the rest: original brick piers are “now usually filled in,” porches “have frequently been remodelled with metal supports or square wooden posts on brick piers,” and many houses had already been “partly modernized with aluminum, asphalt, or asbestos veneers.” The three mills are two-story common-bond brick with segmental-arched windows, and the N. Davidson commercial block is one- and two-story brick divided into storefront bays of 25 to 30 feet.

One caveat changes how to read all of that: those observations were compiled for a listing that took effect in 1990, and thirty-five years of re-siding, additions and infill have happened since. We will not publish a percentage of NoDa homes with vinyl, fiber cement or original wood today, because no source measures it. The working method is to identify the substrate address by address before anything gets scoped — on these houses that means checking the body, the porch ceiling, the skirt below the sill and the gable separately, since they are often different materials from different decades.

Age drives prep, not sales copy. Every contributing house in the district predates 1939, which puts this stock at the old end of the local distribution: 27.9% of Charlotte city homes and 24.8% of Mecklenburg County homes were built before 1980 per U.S. Census Bureau ACS 5-year 2020–2024 data. The ACS publishes no NoDa-level figure, so treat the neighborhood as older than the city median without attaching a number to it; the county and city tables sit in our Charlotte housing stock study. Because the federal lead-paint ban took effect in 1978, painted surfaces on a pre-1939 house can carry lead layers, and asbestos-cement veneer is a live possibility on anything re-sided mid-century. Containment and HEPA-filtered sanding are the baseline for that reason, and zero-VOC products are available on request when the house stays occupied.

This is the fact most often reported wrong about NoDa. The North Charlotte Historic District holds National Register certification and no local designation. Query the City of Charlotte's own Historic Districts GIS layer and it returns eight polygons, every one of them typed “Local” — none is North Charlotte, and the closest of the eight, Plaza-Midwood, ends south of the tracks. The Charlotte Historic District Commission reviews exterior work inside local districts, so it has nothing to review here: no Certificate of Appropriateness, no staff review, no color submittal for a normal house repaint.

That is a choice the neighborhood has made more than once. Axios Charlotte reported in October 2023 that the neighborhood association has repeatedly discussed local designation and declined it, quoting association leadership that added rules “would impact our ability to pursue art, whether that's murals on the side of our businesses or on a homeowner's garage,” and describing residents who “generally embrace the freedom to do whatever they want with their properties.” That reporting described only early exploratory conversation that might never become a proposal; we found no later decision, so confirm current status with the City.

There is no HOA filling the gap either. No association in our 29-entry index of Charlotte-area published architectural rules covers NoDa, and we found no architectural document, approved palette or covenant for this neighborhood at all. The NoDa Neighborhood and Business Association, formerly the Historic North Charlotte Neighborhood Association, describes itself as a “volunteer run, federally recognized 501(c)3 charitable organization” of “local businesses, artisans, homeowners, and renters”: advocacy and community work, not covenant enforcement. Newer townhome and condo buildings may still have their own associations with their own exterior rules, and none of those were verified for this page. The Charlotte HOA painting rules index is still the place to check a neighbouring community or a suburban comparison, and our guide to HOA exterior painting rules in Charlotte walks through the approval process where one does exist.

The real exception is landmark status, which attaches to specific properties rather than to the neighborhood. Highland Park Mill #3, at 2901-2911 North Davidson Street, appears on Mecklenburg County's list of designated historic landmarks. Landmark status pulls a property under Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks, which reviews material alterations under state law and issues the Certificate of Appropriateness itself. The county's painting rules are worth quoting in full: “If the existing color scheme is maintained, the repainting of a designated historic landmark does not require review,” but “the painting of previously unpainted materials requires a COA,” murals and signs painted directly on a landmark require a COA, and “requests for painting unpainted masonry is considered a Major Works project.”

That logic is worth borrowing even where nobody enforces it. In a local district the City treats “requests to paint previously unpainted brick” as a major project heard by the full Commission, while routine in-kind repair and maintenance generally does not require approval. Nothing stops you from coating the brick on an ordinary NoDa house or a N. Davidson storefront — but common-bond brick from 1903 is a one-way decision, and limewash versus painted brick is the comparison to read before committing, since limewash is another coating headed for that same brick.

Exterior house painting on a frame mill house is mostly hand work on a small building. Weatherboard and German siding painted for a century need scraping, feathering and spot priming rather than a color-only pass, and the engaged shed porch shades a band of wall that stays damp and fails first. Whether the topcoat is a Sherwin-Williams, Benjamin Moore or PPG product follows the substrate and the exposure, and the whole scope goes into a written itemized estimate before anyone opens a can.

Rot shows up during prep more often than not on this stock, usually in the bottom courses over foundations where the original brick piers were filled in and drainage changed. Siding repair is the fork in the road there; our comparison of siding repair versus replacement covers how to decide, and on a re-sided house the answer depends heavily on what veneer is actually up there. Trim and baseboard painting carries the hours on these houses — porch posts, sash, the four-over-four windows on the duplexes, and the repeated bracket and post detail that runs down a whole row. The flat runs take HVLP; everything shaped is brushed.

Two services show up here more than in most Charlotte neighborhoods. Metal painting matters because the nomination records porches remodelled with metal supports, and tin and steel are part of the district's recorded fabric — those posts, rails and roof elements take a different system than wood does. Brick painting matters because of the mills and the storefront block, with the caveats above. Inside, nothing is reviewed by anyone: interior painting in a mill house is a normal project, and free color consultation helps square a modern palette with small rooms and original trim profiles. In renovated kitchens and mill-loft conversions, cabinet painting — a color change on sound boxes, including laminate and MDF doors — is a different service from cabinet refinishing, which renews an existing wood finish rather than covering it. The company has been owner-led since 2023, so it is Stan Putilov who walks the job here, same as anywhere else in the Charlotte NC/SC metro. Our paint prep guide sets out what a prep scope on a house this old should say.