The list of small jobs nobody else will come out for.

The repairs a paint job needs first

A lot of what looks like a painting problem is a repair problem wearing paint. A stain on a ceiling, a soft piece of baseboard behind a toilet, a door forced so many times the casing has split, a hole where a towel bar pulled out of the drywall. Paint over any of that and you get a room that looks finished for about a week.

So the walk through at the start of a job is as much a list of these as it is a conversation about color. We would rather find them with you standing there than have you find them after the last coat has gone on and the furniture is back where it belongs.

Because it is the same crew, a repair that turns up halfway through does not need a second company and a second visit. It gets fixed, it gets primed, and the room still finishes when we said it would.

• Drywall holes patched, sanded and texture matched
• Soft or split trim replaced before the finish coat
• Doors adjusted so they close and latch properly
• Popped nails, corner bead and seam cracks repaired
• Every repair primed rather than painted straight over

Drywall, texture and making a patch disappear

A drywall patch is easy to make solid and hard to make invisible. Filling the hole is the quick part. What takes the time is feathering the compound out wide enough that the light does not catch a ridge, sanding it flat, then matching whatever texture is on the rest of the wall.

Most interiors around here carry knockdown or orange peel on the walls and the ceilings. Both can be matched by hand or sprayed, and both take practice to look right. A flat patch on a textured wall is the most obvious repair in a house, and it looks worse after painting than before, because the paint makes it catch the light differently.

Then it gets primed. Joint compound is porous and drinks finish paint faster than the wall around it, which is why an unprimed patch shows as a dull shape however many coats go on top.

Doors, trim and the small carpentry

Doors move in Florida. Humidity swells them in summer so they stick, hinges pull loose in a hollow jamb, and strike plates end up in the wrong place after a house has settled. Most of that is an adjustment rather than a new door, and it takes minutes for somebody who is already in the house with the right screws.

Trim takes its damage at the bottom, where the vacuum hits it and where water finds it. Baseboard behind a toilet, casing beside a shower door, the bottom of the frame at the garage. Anything soft gets replaced rather than filled, because filler in soft wood fails again and takes the new paint with it.

Outside, it is fascia, soffit and the trim around a garage opening that take the weather. Anything soft up there gets dealt with before the exterior is coated, because paint on rotten wood is the most expensive way to hide a problem for one season.

What we will not take on

We do not do electrical, plumbing or anything structural. Those want the trade that is licensed for them, and a handyman doing them cheap is how a small problem turns into an insurance claim.

We also will not paint over something that needs fixing and pretend we did not notice. If the drywall behind a stain is still wet, that stain is coming back through whatever we put on it, and the useful answer is to find where the water is getting in first.

What we do take on is everything in between. The list of small jobs that has been on the fridge for a year, the repairs a room needs before it can be painted properly, and the fixes that make a house feel finished instead of nearly finished.