Exterior Painting

An Exterior Is Not One Surface

Quoting a house by its square footage assumes every square foot ages the same way. It does not. On a Pasadena bungalow the north wall under a deep overhang may still be sound after twelve years while the porch railing cap eight feet away is chalking, checked and starting to open at the joints. Same house, same painter, same product, wildly different lifespan.

The variables are exposure and orientation. A vertical wall sheds water and takes the sun at a slant. A horizontal cap or a deck board holds water and takes it from overhead. South and west elevations get roughly twice the ultraviolet load of the north side across a year, and ultraviolet is what destroys the binder that holds the pigment in place. Once the binder goes, the pigment sits loose on the surface, which is the chalk that comes off on your palm.

We price and plan around that, so the parts of your house doing the hard work get the attention and the parts sitting in shade do not get charged as though they were failing.

Washing, Scraping and the Sound Layer

Every exterior starts with a wash. Not a pressure blast, which drives water behind siding and fuzzes soft wood, but enough pressure and the right detergent to take off the chalk, the film of grit the winds leave behind, and any mildew growing on the shaded elevations. Painting over chalk is the most common reason a good product fails early, because the new coat bonds to loose pigment instead of to the surface.

Then we scrape, and we stop at the sound layer. Old paint that is still tightly bonded is a substrate. Sanding it off turns your repaint into a strip job, exposes bare wood that then needs full priming, and on a pre-1978 house it also generates lead dust for no good reason. What we take off is anything lifting, curling or cracked through. The edge left behind gets feathered so it does not read as a ridge under the new film, and the bare spots get spot primed the same day rather than left open overnight to pick up dew.

Primer Is Not One Product

Bare wood on siding takes a stain-blocking exterior primer, because old redwood and cedar bleed tannin through a topcoat and leave brown shadows in a light color. Bare stucco takes a masonry primer with the alkalinity tolerance to sit on it. A glossy old trim enamel takes a bonding primer, because the new coat has nothing to grip otherwise. End grain, wherever we find it, takes the primer twice: cut ends drink far more than a face and go on failing at that point for years if they are left thirsty.

Getting this wrong is invisible on handover day and obvious in year three. It is also the most common shortcut in a cheap quote, because one bucket of universal primer is faster to buy and faster to apply than three that are right.

Stucco, Siding and Shingle

Spanish Revival stucco is common here and it moves. Hairline cracking is normal on a stucco wall and it does not necessarily mean a structural problem. Elastomeric coatings can bridge those hairlines, and they are genuinely useful on the right wall, but they are also a moisture trap: if the wall has a way of getting wet from behind, a coating that will not let it dry outward pushes the moisture into the framing instead. We look at the drainage and the flashing before recommending one, and often we do not.

Wood siding and shingle want breathability rather than bridging. Acrylic latex over a properly primed and dry surface, applied at a real film thickness rather than stretched thin so the job takes less paint. Two coats over any color change, without argument. A single coat over a darker original will look adequate in flat light on the day and then show as a patchy, translucent version of the color you chose the first time the low afternoon sun hits it.

The Porch, Which Is Where We Start

Columns, piers, railings, balusters, stair stringers, ceiling boards and rafter tails. We probe column bases with an awl before quoting, because the joint where a wood column meets its masonry pier is the single most reliable place to find rot on a house of this age. Water runs down the column, reaches the base, and if the base is tight against the pier it never gets a chance to dry out.

Railing caps get an exterior enamel rather than a wall paint, and the underside of the cap gets coated as carefully as the top, because moisture entering from below is what pushes the topcoat off. Rafter tails and beam ends are cut in by hand. They are end grain hanging in open air with nothing above them, and a sprayed pass that leaves them thin is a guarantee of checking within a few seasons.

Timing Around the Weather

Two limits govern the schedule. Surface temperature at the top end, because a west wall in an inland Pasadena August can be far too hot to coat, and paint that skins before it levels leaves lap marks and a weak film. Dew point at the bottom end, because a surface that cools toward it at the end of a winter day collects moisture on an uncured coat. We shift elevations through the day to stay inside both, which is why we may be on the east side at eight in the morning and the west side at four in the afternoon.

Call (626) 516-0168 and we will walk the house with you, starting at the porch.