Exterior House Painting

Prep Is the Job

Most of what you pay for on an exterior repaint is not paint. It is the washing, scraping, sanding, priming and caulking that happens before the first finish coat, and it is where the difference between a repaint that lasts eight years and one that fails in three is decided. When a quote comes in dramatically low, this is almost always the part that has been left out.

Here is what the sequence actually looks like on a Pasadena house.

Wash and Assess

The house gets washed first, at a pressure the substrate can take. Old wood siding and lime plaster do not want the same pressure as modern stucco, and blasting a bungalow with a turbo nozzle drives water behind the boards and lifts more paint than it cleans.

While it dries we go over the elevations properly. Failing coating, bare wood, open joints, cracked stucco, rot at the bottom of a column or the end of a rafter tail. On a house with deep overhangs the damage is rarely uniform: the south and west elevations take the UV and chalk out, while the shaded north side holds moisture and grows the biological staining.

Scrape, Sand, Repair

Everything loose comes off. Edges get feathered back so the transition does not telegraph through the finish. Rotten wood gets cut out and replaced rather than filled, because filler over rot is a repair with an expiry date.

On any house built before 1978 this is done as lead-safe work: the assumption is that lead paint is present unless testing shows it is not. That means containment sheeting, wet methods, no open dry sanding of old coatings, HEPA vacuuming and a clean-up at the end of every day rather than at the end of the job. It adds real time and real cost, and it is not something to negotiate away.

Prime Correctly

Primers are not interchangeable, and this is the second most common corner cut after prep.

A bonding primer is for a slick or chalky surface where adhesion is the problem. A stain-blocking primer, usually a shellac or an oil based product, is for tannin bleed out of cedar or redwood, for water stains, and for smoke, none of which a water based primer will hold back. A masonry primer is for bare or repaired stucco, where the surface is alkaline and a standard primer will saponify and let go. Bare wood gets primed. Bare stucco patches get primed. Sound existing coating usually does not need it.

Caulk, Then Two Coats

Open joints get caulked after priming, not before, so the caulk bonds to primer rather than to chalk. Trim to siding, casing to wall, the head of a window. Not the bottom edges of siding boards, which need to breathe.

Then two coats. On a color change it is always two, whatever the can says about coverage, and we price it that way from the start so it is not a conversation later. One coat quotes are a way of winning a job that comes back as a callback when the old color grins through on the south wall in eighteen months.

Coatings and When Not to Use Them

Acrylic latex is the default for siding, stucco and most trim. It stays flexible, it breathes, and it holds color under UV far better than the alternatives.

Alkyd still has a place on doors and trim where you want a hard, level film that shows brush marks less. It yellows in the shade and it is slower, so it is a choice, not an upgrade.

Elastomeric coatings get asked about a lot on stucco, and they do a real job: a thick flexible film that bridges hairline cracking. The catch is that they are close to vapor-closed. On a wall that gets wet from behind, from a leak, from sprinklers, from rising damp at the base, the moisture cannot dry outward and the coating comes off in sheets, taking stucco with it. So elastomeric is for a sound, dry wall with a cracking problem, not for a wall with a water problem.

Timing It Right

Dry time and cure time are different numbers. A coat can be dry to recoat in a few hours and still be weeks away from its full hardness, which is why a freshly painted door should not be closed hard onto its weatherstrip the same evening.

Surface temperature governs the schedule more than air temperature. On a hot inland afternoon a west wall in direct sun can be far hotter than the air, and paint applied to it flashes off before it can level or bond. So we chase the shade around the house through the day. At the other end, the surface has to stay a safe margin above the dew point while the film forms, which puts a limit on how late into the evening it is sensible to work.

Wind is the other one. When the Santa Anas come down off the San Gabriels, spraying is over for the day and often for the next one. Grit lands in a wet film and stays there permanently, and overspray travels a lot further than people assume.

What It Costs

An ordinary single story bungalow in sound condition, staying within the same color family, tends to land between $6,500 and $11,000. A color change with the scheme work included runs higher, roughly $8,500 to $16,000. Extensive scraping, wood replacement, stucco repair or a second story move it up, and we will tell you which of those applies on the walkthrough rather than after we have started.

Call (626) 554-4516 and we will come and look at it.