Exterior Painting

Specifying an Exterior for a Coastal Wall

An exterior repaint in Long Beach is not the same job as an exterior repaint in Riverside, and pretending otherwise is how houses near the harbour end up back on the schedule years early. The difference is not the paint aisle. It is the combination of overnight damp, deposited salt and a long, hard afternoon on two elevations out of four.

Here is what that means in practice. The marine layer sits over the coastal streets most nights from late spring into summer. Dew forms on the wall. Airborne salt that has drifted in off the harbour dissolves in that moisture and works into the surface of the stucco or into the grain of exposed trim. By mid morning the fog burns off, the wall warms, the water evaporates and the salt stays behind. Do that a few hundred times and you have a surface that looks fine and will not hold a coating properly.

Substrates We Paint

Stucco. Most of the housing stock here, particularly the post-war tract streets east of Redondo Ave. Stucco is porous, alkaline and moves with temperature. It wants a masonry or alkali resistant primer on bare patches, and a flexible one hundred percent acrylic topcoat. On a badly crazed west elevation an elastomeric coating can bridge hairline cracks and buy real years, but only where the wall has a way to dry inward. Put elastomeric on a wall with a moisture source behind it and you get blisters the size of dinner plates.

Wood siding and trim. The 1920s and 1930s bungalows in Belmont Heights and Rose Park. Wood near the coast is a moisture story rather than a salt story. Ends of boards, the underside of a sill and the bottom two inches of a corner board are where it starts. Soft wood gets cut back, bare timber gets a stain blocking primer, joints get caulked, and the finish coat is a waterborne alkyd that keeps a hard edge without going brittle.

Fascia, eaves and rafter tails. Sheltered from rain, not sheltered from damp. On a flat roofed mid-century house these are frequently the only wood on the building and they get skipped in cheap quotes.

Metal. Balcony railings, security screens, garage door frames on the alley side. Anything ferrous within sight of the water is rusting. Wire brush back to sound metal, spot prime with a rust inhibitive primer, then topcoat. Painting straight over rust bleed hides it for one winter and then it comes through the new finish looking worse than before.

Sheen, and Why It Is Not a Taste Question

The sheen ladder runs flat, eggshell, satin, semi-gloss, gloss. Flat hides a wavy or patched wall and holds dirt. Gloss shows every ripple and washes clean. On the coast that matters more than it does inland, because a wall that can be rinsed is a wall you can get the salt off.

Our usual specification is a low sheen or satin on stucco body, and semi-gloss on trim, doors and railings. Satin on the body is a compromise: enough sheen to shed and be washed, not so much that it lights up every stucco repair on a west wall at four in the afternoon. Where an owner wants flat for the look, we say plainly that it will need washing more often and will not clean up as well.

Coats, Cure and the One Coat Quote

Two coats over a colour change, always. One coat looks convincing on the day the scaffold comes down and then shows through in raking light within a season, particularly on a dark over light change. The cheapest quote in a stack of three is very often the one that has quietly become a one coat job.

There is also a difference between dry time and cure time worth knowing about. A modern exterior acrylic is dry to touch in an hour or two and recoatable the same day. It is not fully cured for two to four weeks. During that window the film is still hardening, which is why we ask people not to lean ladders on a fresh wall or pressure wash it for a month.

The Weather Rules We Actually Follow

Surface temperature above fifty degrees Fahrenheit and rising, surface at least five degrees above the dew point, and no coating going on after the point in the afternoon where the wall will drop back through dew point before the film sets. In June and July on the coastal streets that often means a start around ten and a stop in the late afternoon rather than a dawn to dusk day. It is a shorter working day and we would rather charge for it honestly than paint a damp wall.

What We Do Not Recommend

We will tell you when a house does not need painting. A wall with light chalking, sound caulk and no bare substrate can often be washed and left for another two or three years, or have one elevation done rather than four. Spending the whole budget on the north side of a house that is not weathering is not a service.

Call (562) 235-8413 for a walk around, or find us at 2573 Clark Ave, Long Beach, CA 90806.