Exterior Painting

Four Walls, Four Different Jobs

The single most useful thing we do on an exterior quote is stop treating the house as one surface. In the foothills the elevations age at genuinely different rates, and pricing them all at the same rate means you either overpay for the good side or get shortchanged on the bad one.

The south and west walls take direct sun for most of the day, and here that sun is harsh. Dry inland heat, high UV, and pale hardscape and pavement bouncing more light back up at the lower part of the wall. Those elevations chalk, fade and lose film thickness years before the others. Deep colors go first, particularly the reds, terracottas and strong yellows that look right on a Revival house.

The north wall, especially under the deep overhangs and exposed rafter tails you get on the Craftsman influenced houses around here, is the opposite. Barely any direct sun, slow to dry after a wet spell, and prone to organic growth on the damp side. It often holds sound paint far longer, and it is often where peeling starts if there is a moisture problem.

East is usually the mildest. Morning sun, then shade.

So we walk all four, note what each needs, and quote accordingly. On plenty of houses that means a full system on two elevations and a wash and topcoat on the other two, which is a meaningfully smaller number than a blanket price.

Prep, and Why It Is Most of the Bill

Nobody photographs prep and everybody sees the result of it. On an exterior it is the pressure wash at a pressure that cleans rather than one that drives water into the wall, the scraping back of failed film to a sound edge, the sanding of that edge so it does not telegraph as a ridge through the new coat, the spot priming of every bare area, and the caulking of joints where two materials meet.

Caulking is worth a paragraph on these houses. Trim to stucco, window casing to sill, the joints on a wood door surround, the seams where a later addition meets original work. Those joints move, and a bead that has hardened and split is an open path for water. We cut out failed sealant rather than laying fresh caulk over it, then tool the new bead properly and give it time to skin before anything goes over it. A skinned bead takes paint. A wet one wrinkles.

Trim, Rafter Tails and Doors

The woodwork fails before the stucco does, every time. Exposed rafter tails and barge boards sit out beyond the roof line with sun on them and no protection, and when the film opens up the end grain drinks water. Those get scraped, any soft wood cut back or consolidated, primed on all faces we can reach, and coated properly.

For flat trim and fascia we use a quality exterior acrylic latex. It stays flexible, it handles the daily expansion and contraction of wood in this climate, and it holds color. For entry doors and sash where you want a hard, level, furniture like finish, a waterborne alkyd earns its place. It levels out brush marks the way a traditional oil does without the yellowing and without the recoat times that make a door a two day problem.

Sheen matters more outside than people expect. Flat hides an uneven wall but holds dirt and cannot be washed. Satin on stucco is our usual answer, enough sheen to shed grit and be rinsed, not so much that every trowel mark stands out. Semi-gloss on trim and doors, where you want the definition and the washability.

Working Around the Weather

We paint by surface temperature, not air temperature. A west facing stucco wall in late afternoon in September can be far hotter than the air, well past the point where an acrylic should be going on. Paint applied to a hot surface skins over before it has flowed out and bonded, and the film that results is thin, patchy and short lived. So on hot days we chase the shade around the house, starting east and finishing west.

Santa Ana conditions are the other constraint. Hot, dry wind pulls water out of a coating far faster than the manufacturer assumed, with the same skinning problem, and it also carries grit that lands in the wet film. On a strong wind day we work smaller sections, we work sheltered elevations, or we stop. We would rather lose a day than hand back a wall with dust set into the topcoat.

At the other end, we watch the dew point on the cool mornings. A surface that is below the dew point has moisture condensing on it, invisible but there, and paint applied over that does not bond. Late starts in winter are not laziness.

Lead Safe Practice

Pasadena housing stock is overwhelmingly pre-1978, which means the older paint layers should be assumed to contain lead until a test says otherwise. That changes the prep. No dry scraping, no open sanding, no power washing that atomizes old film across the yard. We test, then we wet the surface, contain the work area with sheeting, use HEPA vacuums on any mechanical tool and bag the debris for proper disposal.

It costs time. It is also the difference between a repaint and a contamination problem in the soil where your kids play, and we do not treat it as a line item to be negotiated away.

Two Coats, and Why

If you are changing color, it is two coats. There is no version of a color change that covers properly in one, and a one coat quote on a color change is either a misunderstanding or a plan to come back thin. Even on a color match, a wall with any absorbency variation needs the second coat to even out sheen.

We also distinguish dry time from cure time. A coating can be dry to touch in an hour and still be weeks from full cure and full block resistance. That matters for doors, for anything that will be leaned against, and for when you can put the patio furniture back against the wall.

Call (626) 806-0562 for a walkthrough, and we will price the house elevation by elevation.