Exterior Painting

An Exterior Job Here Is a Weather Job

Most of what makes an exterior repaint last has nothing to do with the color. It is whether the surface was clean and sound when the coating went on, and whether the coating was given conditions in which it could flow, level and cure. In Pasadena the second of those is not a given. The dry offshore wind that runs down out of the San Gabriels several times a season will hand you a bright, warm, apparently perfect painting day that is quietly ruining every wall you touch.

So we sequence the house around it. Elevations are treated as separate working faces, not as one continuous job, and we keep a sheltered face in reserve for the mornings the gauge reads wrong.

What the Wind Actually Does

Three separate problems, and it helps to keep them apart because the responses differ.

Grit. Dry season wind carries fine soil, pollen and shredded leaf litter, and a wet film is flypaper for all of it. Once it has set in, the only fix is sanding it back and recoating, which means you are paying for the wall twice.

Overspray. Atomized coating is light enough that a gust takes it across a property line easily. Cars, windows, solar panels, pool copings, a neighbor’s hedge. Overspray removal is a specialist job and an unpleasant conversation, and both are avoidable by not spraying on the wrong day.

Flash drying. This is the one that costs you years rather than a weekend. Wind strips solvent or water out of the surface faster than the film underneath can release it. The paint skins. Brush marks and lap lines set instead of flowing out, and adhesion to the substrate develops poorly. The wall looks acceptable on handover and starts letting go on the exposed elevations far earlier than it should.

Prep, Which Is Most of the Cost

Washing first, low pressure, because a pressure washer aimed at old stucco or a butt joint in wood siding drives water into places that then have to dry for days before anything can be coated. Then scraping and sanding failed coating back to a sound edge and feathering it so the transition does not telegraph through the new work.

Bare wood gets a stain blocking primer that will hold back tannin bleed from the older redwood and cedar found on houses around here. Bare stucco and patched stucco get a masonry primer, which is a different product for a different reason: it handles alkalinity that would otherwise attack a finish coat. Glossy old enamel gets a bonding primer. These are not interchangeable and buying one primer for the whole house is how people end up with peeling in three places for three different reasons.

Then caulking. Trim to stucco, casing joints, window perimeters, the joint where the fascia meets the rafter tail. A good elastomeric or siliconized acrylic sealant, tooled rather than smeared, and given time to skin before anything goes over it.

Rot Is Repaired, Not Coated

The deep overhangs and exposed rafter tails on the Craftsman stock here are wonderful and they are also exposed timber ends pointing at the sky. Soft wood gets probed, cut back to sound material and either rebuilt with an epoxy consolidant and filler or scarfed with a new piece. We will show you what we found. Paint over rot buys a season and costs you the whole detail later.

Coating

Two coats. Always two on a color change, and in practice two on anything that matters, because a single coat of a quality acrylic does not build the film thickness the manufacturer’s stated service life assumes. One coat quotes are cheaper for a reason and the reason arrives about year four.

Where hairline map cracking runs across an older stucco field, an elastomeric coating can bridge it and is a genuinely good answer. Where a wall has a moisture source behind it, a failed flashing, a sprinkler hitting it daily, a slab detail that wicks, that same elastomeric traps the water and blisters. We look for the source first. If we cannot rule it out, we recommend a breathable acrylic instead and say why.

Surface temperature and dew point govern the start and the finish of each day. A west wall in late afternoon can be well above the maximum application temperature on the can while the air feels fine, and an early start against a cold surface risks coating below the minimum. We touch the wall.

The Site While We Are On It

Cars discussed and moved or covered. Plants sheeted and tied rather than draped. Drop cloths weighted at the edges. Masking cut in properly at glass and hardscape. Everything swept and the walkways clear at the end of each day, because you live here while this is happening.

Call (626) 472-6045 and we will walk the elevations with you.