Exterior Painting

Painting the Outside of an Older Pasadena House

An exterior repaint here is mostly a preparation job with a coat of paint at the end of it. That is not a slogan, it is where the hours go. On a typical Craftsman bungalow, four of the seven or eight working days are spent before a finish coat is opened, and the two or three days after that are the part everybody pictures when they think about hiring a painter.

The house dictates the method. Pasadena has wood siding and shingle, Spanish Revival stucco, a lot of exposed structural woodwork under those deep Greene and Greene influenced overhangs, and a climate that is hard on all three in different ways. Hot dry inland summers with serious UV load, Santa Ana winds that drive grit into a wet film, and a long dry season followed by rain that finds every joint that was not caulked.

Preparation

We start with a walk around and a look at where the coating is actually failing, which is rarely uniform. On a house that predates 1978 we test the surfaces we intend to disturb before any of this begins, and if a result comes back positive the prep runs wet and contained. That is covered properly on our lead-safe preparation page.

The prep itself is the usual list done without shortcuts. Wash down and let the substrate dry, and on stucco that means genuinely dry rather than dry to the touch. Scrape the failing material back to a sound edge. Feather the transitions so the repaint does not read as a patchwork in low sun. Fill splits in rafter tails and fascia, splice out anything that is gone rather than burying it in filler. Reset popped nails. Then caulk: joints, butt ends of siding, trim to stucco transitions, and around window and door casings. Caulk is cheap and it is the single biggest determinant of whether water gets behind the finish next winter.

Primer Is Not One Product

Primers are not interchangeable and swapping one for another is where a lot of jobs quietly go wrong. Bare wood coming up out of a scrape wants a bonding or an alkyd primer that will penetrate and hold. Stucco and masonry want a masonry primer with an alkaline tolerant binder, because a good acrylic topcoat put straight onto a fresh or high pH surface will saponify and let go. Tannin bleed through on redwood and cedar, or a water stain on a soffit, needs a stain blocking primer and generally a shellac based one. Painting a stain blocker over the whole house because it worked on one board is a waste of your money, and skipping it on the one board that needed it is a callback.

Coatings and Sheen

Body coats on siding and stucco are almost always a good quality one hundred percent acrylic. It stays flexible, it holds color under UV, and it lets a wall breathe outward, which matters more here than people expect.

Elastomeric coatings come up constantly in stucco conversations and they are genuinely useful in the right place. They build thick and bridge hairline cracking that an ordinary coating will telegraph straight through. But they are close to a vapor barrier, so on a wall that takes on moisture from behind, from a leaking gutter, a sprinkler hitting the base, or rising damp at a slab edge, that moisture cannot get out and the coating blisters off in sheets. We recommend elastomeric where the cracking justifies it and the wall can dry. Otherwise a flexible acrylic over a properly filled crack is the better answer and the cheaper one.

Sheen is a real decision, not a preference. Flat hides an uneven surface better than anything else, which is why it suits old stucco and patched siding, but it holds dirt and does not wash. Eggshell and satin give you a little washability and a little more color depth at the cost of showing more of the wall’s history. Semi-gloss and gloss belong on trim, doors and railings where you want the wipe-down and where the crisp line is part of the look. Putting a gloss on a wavy century old wall lights up every defect on the west elevation at five in the afternoon.

On trim and doors specifically, an acrylic enamel now performs well enough that the old default of an oil based alkyd is no longer automatic. Alkyd still flows out flatter and gives a harder film, which some people want on a front door. It also yellows in a shaded entry and it takes far longer to cure. We will use either and we will tell you which we think fits the door.

Two Coats, and the Weather

Two finish coats over a color change, always. One coat over a significant change in color gives you a film that looks acceptable on the day and thin everywhere the sun hits it a year later. The single coat quotes people compare against ours are usually a second coat deferred into the future at your expense.

Weather sets the schedule more than we would like. We do not put a coat on when the surface is near the dew point in the morning, and we do not paint into direct sun on a hot afternoon, because the film skins before it can level or bond. In practice that means chasing shade around the house through the day and starting on the east side. Dry time and cure time are different things: a coat can be recoatable in four hours and still be weeks away from its full hardness, which is why we ask you to be gentle with a freshly painted door and to keep sprinklers off a new wall for the first while.

South and West Fail First

The inland sun here is the main enemy of an exterior finish. UV breaks down the binder from the surface down, so a wall chalks, then fades, then loses its film integrity, and the south and west elevations get years more of that than the north side does. It is completely normal for those two walls to need attention on a shorter cycle than the rest of the house.

If the budget is tight, that is where we would send it. Doing two elevations properly beats spreading a thin coat over four. Call (626) 566-4947 and we will come and tell you which walls actually need it this year.