Approved color or it does not go on the wall.

Three kinds of building in one city

St. Petersburg is not one housing stock. There are the bungalows and craftsman houses in Old Northeast, Kenwood and Historic Uptown, wood siding and real wood trim on houses approaching a hundred years old. There is block and stucco across most of the rest of the city. Then there is everything commercial, from a storefront to an office suite to a warehouse unit.

Wood frame is a different job to stucco and it costs more hours. Loose paint has to be scraped, bare wood primed, and every seam, sill and nail head dealt with before a finish coat goes near it. Skipping that is exactly why old siding peels again within a couple of years.

Block and stucco has the opposite pattern. Those walls are usually sound and the failure is at the openings, where old caulk has dried out and let water in around a window frame. Cutting that out and resealing it properly is most of what makes the repaint last.

• Loose paint scraped and bare wood primed on siding
• Window and door joints cut out and resealed before finish
• District or association colors approved before a truck arrives
• Work scheduled around the hours a commercial space trades
• Repair shown as its own line on the estimate

Approved colors and the paperwork

The historic districts and a lot of the association streets both run approved palettes with a submission before anything changes on the outside. Painting first and applying afterwards is how somebody in every district ends up paying for the same house twice, and it happens every year.

So we pick colors with you that live inside the palette, write them in the format the reviewing body asks for, and wait for the letter before a truck shows up. Some want a form and the color codes, some want a physical sample on the wall. That takes as long as it takes.

Color also reads differently on a house than on a card. A gray that looks soft on a two inch chip can go cold across a sunlit elevation, so where it matters we would rather you looked at it on the actual wall, at the time of day you are usually home, before it is committed to.

Commercial, and the hours you trade

A commercial repaint is a scheduling problem as much as a painting one. An office wants its walls done without anybody losing a day at a desk, a store wants the front usable at opening, and a unit between tenants has a date on it that is not moving for anybody.

So the work runs to your hours instead of ours. Evenings, weekends, or a phased run through the space with the area we are in closed off and the rest of it still trading. It gets cleaned and put back at the end of every session rather than at the end of the week.

Materials change too. A wall in a working corridor takes hands, carts and shoulders, so it wants a finish that can be wiped and touched up rather than the flat you would put on a bedroom ceiling. That gets chosen with you and named on the estimate.

Getting a price in St. Petersburg

Call (727) 744-3232 or send the form with the address and what you need. For a house in a district, say which one, because the approval process is the first thing that has to start and everything else is arranged behind it.

For a commercial space, tell us the hours you trade and any date you are working to. The estimate is free and written either way, with repair separated from painting so you can see where the hours are actually going.