Before you repaint your house, peeling must be found and corrected.
Look the house over and note where peeling has occurred.
Moisture is usually involved somewhere.
If an entire wall of the house is peeling or peeling is found outside rooms that have a high moisture content like bathrooms, kitchens, or laundry rooms, the problem is moisture migrating from inside the house.
The water vapor contained in the warm inside air travels through the wall and when it reaches the exterior paint, it pushes the paint off the wall to get out.
Although most latex exterior paints are more permeable to vapor than oil-based or alkyd paints, a thick layer of any paint will act as a barrier to vapor.
To prevent water vapor from entering the wall cavity, paint the interior walls with a vapor-barrier paint and caulk inside around all penetrations through the wall, like vents, pipes, and wires.
The old practice of installing small round exterior vents near the bottom and top of each stud cavity to vent the moisture does not work.
Studies have shown that this practice reduces moisture levels only in the wall facing the prevailing wind, and then just slightly.
If the blistered areas are located at the bottom of the siding, the problem is probably water splashing onto the siding from the ground and traveling up the wall via capillary action.
By this means, water can travel up hill in the tiny space between two pieces of siding.
It's like the tiny capillary tube a nurse used to capture some of your blood so it can be tested.
The nurse pricks your finger and puts the end of a capillary tube in the drop of blood that forms.
The blood moves up the tube by capillary action, not by suction.
Among the causes of peeling near the ground is siding that is touching or too close to the ground, the ground level sloping toward the house rather than away from it, bushes too near the siding to allow it to dry, and gutters and down-sprouts that drain too near the house.
If you can't stand the looks of the siding, scrape the paint off and paint this area with a thin latex paint.
This will do until you can correct the faulty drainage.
If the top courses of siding are peeling, there is probably water leaking into the wall from the roof.
The cause might be leaky gutters, rotted roof trim, damaged flashing, or ice dams in winter that are letting the water in.
Any of these must be fixed before painting.
Paint can also peel when it is on masonry.
I once knew a bricklayer who vowed that there was a special place in hell reserved for people who painted over brick.
I doubt that the peeling paint is God's vengeance.
It is the result either of moisture in the brick or the surface's being too crumbly to hold the paint.
In the first instance, the solution is to keep water away fro the brickwork.
In the second, repaint and replaster the surface so that the paint can adhere to it.