Water on three sides changes what goes on the wall.

Canal streets, and what salt does to a finish

Apollo Beach is built on dredged finger canals, so a large share of the housing has water at the back of the lot, a dock and a seawall. That is a lovely place to live and a hard place to keep paint on a wall. Salt spray carries in on the wind, settles on the surface, and every night the dew pulls it deeper in.

Salt does two jobs at once. It works at the coating itself, and it goes after every piece of metal on the house, from the railings to the fasteners in the fascia to the hinges on a side gate. A rust stain running down a freshly painted wall is nearly always something metal above it that nobody dealt with first.

So the wash on a waterfront house has to genuinely rinse salt out of the surface rather than just take the dirt off it, and the metal gets looked at before the walls do. That is the difference between an exterior that lasts and one you are looking at again in four years.

• Salt rinsed out of the surface, not just dirt taken off
• Railings, fasteners and fixtures dealt with before the walls
• Elastomeric or masonry acrylic chosen for your wall
• Access over docks and pool decks planned before the day
• Association color approval in hand before we start

Two story elevations and glare off the canal

A lot of these homes are two stories with a wide rear elevation facing open water, which means full afternoon sun bouncing off the canal onto the back of the house. The rear wall on a waterfront home often ages faster than the front, which surprises people who assumed the street side took the worst of it.

Working that elevation means access over a dock, a seawall or a pool deck, and that gets planned before the day rather than solved on it. Everything below gets covered, because overspray landing on a boat lift, a screen cage or the water itself is a problem nobody wants to be having.

Where a wall has a lot of fine cracking and takes wind driven rain straight off the bay, an elastomeric coating earns its keep, because it bridges the cracks that let water in. On a sound wall we would rather use a masonry acrylic that breathes and recoats easily later. We will tell you which one your house is.

The gated communities and the color form

MiraBay, Symphony Isles and several of the newer streets sit inside associations with an approved palette and a submission process. Painting first and asking later is how people end up paying for the same house twice, so on any home with architectural rules we get the color approved in writing before a truck shows up.

Gate access is worth mentioning at the estimate too. A code, a call box or a vendor list is all fine as long as we know about it before there is a crew sitting at the gate with the day's materials in the truck.

Inside those communities the houses are newer, so the work is usually a first repaint over builder paint rather than a rescue. Builder paint is one thin sprayed coat, and it is the reason a ten year old house can look older than a twenty year old one that was repainted properly.

Getting a price in Apollo Beach

Call (813) 500-1564 or send the form. We will come out, walk all four elevations, look at the canal side as carefully as the street side, and put a written number on it with the product and the coats named. There is no charge for the look and no obligation after it.

If your house is on the water, say so when you call. It changes the wash, it changes what we recommend for a coating, and it changes how we plan access. All three belong in the estimate rather than turning up as a surprise later in the week.