Exterior Painting in Pasadena

Cinemadumeep repaints the outside of Pasadena houses, and we write the south and west elevations as a separate scope inside every estimate. Those two walls take most of the year’s ultraviolet load, so they need more film, better pigment and a tighter approach to the joints than the shaded faces do. Quoting all four the same way is the reason so many exteriors look uneven three summers in.

Why the Sun Side Gets Its Own Spec

Ultraviolet light breaks the chemical bonds in a paint film. It attacks the pigment, which is why colour shifts, and it attacks the resin binding that pigment to the wall, which is why an old coating chalks. Both processes speed up with heat, and a west facing wall in an inland city is hot for precisely the hours when the light is strongest.

The consequence on the ground is a house where the north elevation still looks like the colour card and the west elevation is a lighter, dustier version of itself. The film on that west wall may not have peeled. It has simply stopped being a coating in any protective sense, and water now moves in and out of the substrate more or less freely.

So we build that wall differently. More thickness in the finish, pigments chosen for lightfastness rather than for brightness on a chip, and every horizontal joint and penetration caulked before topcoat because those joints move more where the daily temperature swing is largest.

Colour and Pigment, Which Is the Real Decision

Two paints at the same price can behave nothing alike on a sun exposed wall, and the difference is what is in the can rather than what is on the label.

Inorganic pigments, principally the iron oxides that give earth reds, ochres, browns, warm greys and the muted greens, are extremely stable under ultraviolet. Titanium dioxide white is stable too. These are the colours that still read correctly after eight summers on a west elevation.

Organic pigments give the saturated colours. Bright yellows, hot reds, oranges, strong blues and violets. They are gorgeous and they are fugitive, some of them noticeably so within three or four years of direct exposure. That does not make them useless. Put them on a front door under a deep Craftsman overhang, on a shaded porch ceiling, or on trim on the north face, and they will hold for a long time. Put them on the wall that takes the afternoon and you have bought a repaint you did not plan for.

We will tell you which family your chosen colour falls into before you commit. If the colour you love is an organic and it has to go on the sun side, we say so plainly and you decide with the information in hand.

Sheen, and What the Afternoon Reveals

The sheen ladder runs from flat through eggshell, satin and semi gloss to gloss, and each rung trades hiding for washability. Flat scatters light and conceals a patched stucco repair almost completely. Gloss reflects, cleans easily, and shows everything.

On a Pasadena exterior, low afternoon sun rakes across a west wall at a shallow angle. That is the single most revealing light a wall ever sees. A satin body coat that looked perfectly smooth at noon will show every roller lap, every trowel edge and every feathered scrape line at five in the evening. For that reason we usually keep the body flat or low sheen and put the durability into film build, then step up to satin on siding and semi gloss on trim and doors where the surfaces are small, tight and worth cleaning.

Substrates We Work On Here

Stucco, on the Spanish Revival houses and on plenty of later additions. It takes a masonry primer if it is bare or chalky, and it is the substrate where elastomeric coatings are worth discussing, because they bridge hairline map cracking that a conventional film simply spans and then splits over. The caution is that elastomeric is a moisture trap. If the wall cannot dry to the inside, or if there is a drainage or flashing problem behind it, that coating will hold water against the substrate and make the situation worse. We check before we recommend it.

Wood siding and shingle, which needs failed film taken back to sound edges, feathered, spot primed with a bonding primer and then brought level. Cut corners here and the repair telegraphs through the topcoat forever.

Exposed rafter tails and fascia, the signature of the local Craftsman houses. The end grain on a rafter tail wicks water like a straw, so it gets sealed as end grain before anything else happens to it.

Sequence on a Typical Job

Wash first, always, and test for chalk afterward by rubbing the dry wall. Scrape and sand back to edges that will not lift. Spot prime the bare areas with the primer the substrate calls for. Caulk the joints. Then two finish coats over any colour change, because one coat over a different colour leaves a film that is thin in the very places the roller stretched it, and those are the places that fail first.

Dry time is not cure time. A coating can be dry to touch in an hour and still be weeks away from its final hardness. We plan the schedule around surface temperature and dew point rather than around the calendar, which occasionally means we do not start on a given morning.

Call (626) 333-4716 and we will walk the elevations with you.