The prep is the job. The paint is the easy part.

Why exterior paint gives up down here

Paint on a Florida house has a hard life. Ultraviolet light 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 before it fails. The color goes flat and powdery, and if you drag a hand across the wall you get chalk on your palm. That chalk is the binder in the old coating breaking down, and it works like a release layer. Anything painted on top of it is stuck to loose dust instead of 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. A sound wall gets washed and coated. A chalking wall needs the chalk taken off and a masonry primer that can grip what is left underneath. Those are two different jobs at two different numbers, and you will know which one you are getting before you agree to anything.

• Chalk checked on every elevation before we quote
• Wash, dry, repair, prime, then two coats
• Sherwin-Williams product and sheen named on the estimate
• 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 house wash. Mildew grows on the shaded side of almost every house in this county, and the black speckling you see on a soffit is alive. Paint over it feeds it, and it comes back up through the new coat looking exactly the way it did before you paid anybody.

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

Then we let it dry. That is the step people skip. In July, when the air is thick and it rains at four in the afternoon, a wall that feels dry on the surface can still be damp an eighth of an inch in. We schedule the coating for after the wall has had real drying time, and we would rather move a day than seal water into your stucco.

Elastomeric or acrylic on stucco

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 later, it costs less, and it is the right call on a sound wall whose hairline cracks have already been repaired.

An elastomeric coating is far thicker and it stretches. It bridges fine cracks and keeps wind driven rain out of a wall that has a lot of them, 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 getting in from somewhere else, a failing window seal or grade sitting too high against the slab, an elastomeric traps it and the coating blisters.

So we look at your wall and then tell you which one it wants, and why. Both come in Sherwin-Williams, and whichever we recommend goes on the estimate by name with the sheen and the number of coats, instead of a line that just says premium exterior paint.

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 instead of smeared over. That joint is where most water gets into a Florida wall, and new paint over dried out caulk hides the problem rather than fixing it.

Some cracks are not a painting problem at all. A stair step crack running through the block joints, or one wide enough to take a pencil, is the house telling you something a coating will never answer. We will say so and show you a photo, rather than fill it, paint it and let you find out next year.

Sun, salt and the order the walls get done in

Which way a wall faces changes how it gets painted. The west elevation takes the worst of the afternoon and it is the wall 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.

Closer to the water in Apollo Beach it is salt as well as sun. Salt settles on the wall, then dew pulls it into the surface, and it works at the coating and at every piece of metal on the house. Waterfront elevations get rinsed properly before anything goes on, and the railings, fasteners and light fixtures get the same attention as the walls.

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 weather, and stop when we should instead of pushing a coat out and hoping.

HOA colors, approved before we start

A lot of the houses in Riverview, Lithia and Sun City Center sit inside an association with an approved color palette and a form to fill in. 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. 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 be done once.