Salt and sun decide how long a coat lasts.

Why exterior paint gives up on this coast

Paint on a Pinellas house has a hard life. Ultraviolet runs hard from March through September, rain arrives most summer afternoons and soaks a wall in ten minutes, and heat pushes moisture outward through block and stucco from the inside. A coating that would last a decade somewhere mild gets a much shorter run here, and the south and west walls always go first.

You can see it starting well before it fails. The color goes flat and powdery, and if you drag a hand across the wall you come away with chalk on your palm. That chalk is the binder in the old coating breaking down, and it behaves like a release layer. Anything painted on top of it is stuck to loose dust rather than to the wall, and it lets go in sheets a year or two later.

So the first thing we do on any exterior is work out what state the existing coating is in, elevation by elevation. A sound wall gets washed and coated. A chalking wall needs the chalk carried off and a masonry primer that can grip what is left underneath. Those are two different jobs at two different numbers, and you know which one you are getting before you agree to anything.

• Chalk checked on every elevation before we quote
• Pressure clean, dry, repair, prime, then coat
• Caulk at the openings cut out and replaced
• Stucco cracks opened, filled and textured, never coated over
• Windows, doors and trim cut in by hand

The wash, and why we wait after it

Every exterior starts with a pressure clean. Mildew grows on the shaded side of nearly every house in this county, and the black speckling on a soffit is alive. Paint over it and you feed it, and it comes back up through the new coat looking exactly the way it did before you paid anybody.

The wash goes on with a cleaner that kills the growth at a pressure the wall can take, rather than at a pressure that drives water into it. Stucco and older block will take water on if you blast them, and a wall holding water will not let a coating bond. On a chalky elevation the wash also carries the loose binder away, which is half the reason it is worth doing slowly.

Then we let it dry. That is the step people skip. In July, with the air thick and rain at four in the afternoon, a wall that feels dry on the surface can still be damp an eighth of an inch in. One customer wrote that we did a fantastic job pressure washing, caulking and sealing before we painted, and that the whole job came in at four and a half days even after she changed a color partway through.

Stucco, block and what goes on them

There are two honest choices for a stucco or block wall and they are not interchangeable. A masonry acrylic is a normal paint film. It breathes, it recoats easily years later, it costs less, and it is the right call on a sound wall whose hairline cracking has already been repaired.

An elastomeric coating is far thicker and it stretches. It bridges fine cracking and keeps wind driven rain out of a wall that has a lot of it, which is why it turns up on older block houses and on exposed two story elevations. The trade is that it holds moisture in as well as keeping it out. On a wall that already has water arriving from somewhere else, a failed window seal or dirt graded too high against the slab, an elastomeric traps it and the coating blisters.

So we look at your wall and then say which one it wants and why. Whichever we recommend goes on the estimate with the sheen and the number of coats, instead of a line that says premium exterior paint and leaves you to guess.

Cracks, caulk and the openings

Stucco cracks in Florida. Houses settle on sand, block joints move with the heat, and the corners of every window and door are stress points. A hairline crack is normal. Coating over one is what turns it into a callback, because the crack is still moving under the fresh paint and it opens back up inside a season.

Cracks get opened out so the filler has something to key into, filled, textured to match the wall around them, then sealed. Where a wall meets a window frame, a door frame or a garage opening, the old caulk gets cut out and replaced rather than smeared over. That joint is where most water gets into a Florida wall, and new paint over a split bead hides the problem instead of fixing it.

One customer wrote that Nick scraped, plastered, sanded and painted her exterior again to perfection, several years after he had taken wallpaper off the inside of the same house. Scraping and plastering are the parts nobody photographs, and they are the parts that decide whether the color is still on the wall in year eight.

Which way the wall faces, and how close the water is

Orientation changes how a wall gets painted. The west elevation takes the worst of the afternoon and it is the one that fails first, so it gets the most attention at the prep stage. We also work with the sun through the day, because rolling a dark color onto a wall too hot to touch flashes the finish and leaves lap marks you can see from the driveway.

Out toward Clearwater Beach, Crystal Beach and the Dunedin causeway it is salt as well as sun. Salt settles on the wall, dew pulls it into the surface overnight, and it works at the coating and at every piece of metal on the house. A rust run down a fresh wall is nearly always something metal above it that nobody dealt with first, so railings, fasteners and light fixtures get looked at before the walls do.

Afternoon storms decide the rest of the schedule from June onward. A finish coat needs time on the wall before rain touches it, so we start early, work the elevations in an order that keeps us ahead of the sky, and stop when we should rather than pushing a coat out and hoping.

HOA colors, approved before we start

A lot of Pinellas sits inside an association with an approved palette and a form to fill in. East Lake, the newer parts of Trinity, most of the gated streets and every condo building have some version of it. Painting first and asking afterwards can mean painting a second time at your own cost, and we have no interest in that being how your job goes.

So on any home with architectural rules we pick the colors with you, write them the way the association wants to see them, and wait for the letter before a truck shows up. Boards normally want a form, the color names and codes, and sometimes a physical sample on the wall. That takes as long as it takes and it is worth doing in that order.

If you are not sure what your community allows, check your last statement or ask a neighbor who painted recently, and we will work inside whatever the rules turn out to be. We would rather your job start two weeks later and only happen once.