Exterior Painting

Most of an Exterior Job Happens Before the Colour

On a stucco house the painting itself is the short part. Washing, scraping, patching, caulking and priming take longer, cost more, and decide almost everything about how the finish looks in five years. When two quotes for the same house are a long way apart, the gap is nearly always in this section rather than in the paint.

Washing comes first, and near the water it does more than remove dust. Old exterior paint chalks as the binder breaks down in the sun, leaving a fine powder on the surface, and a coating applied over chalk bonds to the powder rather than to the wall. Salt film off the harbour does something similar. We wash, let the wall dry properly, and then run a hand over it to check what comes off before anything else happens.

Then the wall gets gone over by hand. Loose and flaking material is scraped back to something sound, edges are feathered so the transition does not show through the new film, cracks are filled and textured, and any bare plaster gets a masonry primer. Stain sources such as rust bleed from an old window guard or tannin from a wood detail get a stain blocking primer instead, because ordinary primer will let those come back through the topcoat within months. Bonding, stain blocking and masonry primers are three different products for three different problems and they are not interchangeable.

Caulking, and Why It Is Not Filler

Every joint where two different materials meet gets caulked. Window and door frames against stucco, trim to wall, fascia joints, and the penetrations for pipes, vents, lights and hose bibs. These are the places water actually gets into a wall, and on the older houses in this city the original caulking has usually gone hard and pulled away from one side of the joint.

Caulk is not a substitute for patching, and a crack in the middle of a field of stucco should not be caulked. It is for joints that move, between materials that expand at different rates. Filling a wall crack with caulk leaves a shiny rubbery line that flashes differently from the wall beside it under any raking light, and it is one of the clearest signs of a rushed job.

Choosing the Coating

For most Long Beach houses the right topcoat is a good quality exterior acrylic latex. It stays flexible enough for normal wall movement, it holds colour, and it breathes, which matters a great deal on a wall that takes the marine layer every morning. Where the wall is heavily map cracked and dry, an elastomeric system may be the better answer, and we quote that separately because it is a different job with different conditions attached.

Trim and doors are a separate decision. A waterborne alkyd or a high quality acrylic enamel on fascia, window frames and front doors gives a harder, smoother film that stands up to being touched, cleaned and rained on. The sheen ladder is worth knowing here. Flat hides surface imperfection and holds dirt, eggshell and satin are the usual compromise on a body coat, and semi gloss or gloss on trim shows every ripple in the substrate but wipes clean and sheds water. Going up the ladder to make a wall look smart is a common mistake, because a higher sheen on stucco advertises the texture and every patch in it.

Colour change matters more than people expect. Going from a dark body to a light one, or the reverse, takes two full coats and sometimes a tinted primer under them, and a one coat quote over a colour change will look thin and patchy on the elevations that get direct sun. That is where the one coat saving comes back.

Working Around the Weather Here

The local pattern sets the working day. The marine layer sits on a house through the morning, so the wall carries surface damp long after the air feels dry, and coating over that gives poor adhesion and a dull patchy film. We check the wall rather than the sky, and we start when it has dried.

At the other end, exterior coatings have a minimum surface temperature and a maximum, and on a hot afternoon a south or west wall can be well above what the product allows even when the air temperature is fine. Paint that flashes off too fast does not level and does not form a proper film. So the sun facing elevations get done earlier in the day and the shaded ones later, which is why an exterior job here takes a day longer than the same house would inland.

South and west walls also carry most of the fade and most of the damage, because UV is what breaks down the binder. If a budget will not stretch to the whole house at once, doing those two elevations first is a real strategy rather than a compromise.

Living in the House While It Happens

Most of our work is on occupied homes. That means masking that actually stays up, containment where we are disturbing old coatings, drop sheets over planting rather than through it, and a proper clean up at the end of each day so the driveway and the alley are usable. On anything built before 1978 we work to lead safe practice on the surfaces we disturb, which is mostly about containing and collecting debris rather than anything dramatic.

A typical single storey house runs four to six working days including prep. Call (562) 950-8749 and we will walk it with you.