Where the Job Actually Starts
Cidnola paints houses in Pasadena. We are on Lake Ave in the 91103 ZIP, and most of what we do is within a short drive of it, which matters more than it sounds: the houses on these streets have enough in common that we are rarely guessing about what is under the last coat.
We ended up specializing in the color half of the job by accident. Owners kept calling with the painting already decided and the colors still open, and on a district street that is the wrong way round. Color is the part somebody else may need to understand before a brush comes out, and it is the part you live with for a decade. So we split it out. You can hire us to work out a scheme, document it, and hand it over, and you are under no obligation to have us paint it. Plenty of people do exactly that.
How We Work
We start at the house, not at a fan deck. What the building is, when it was built, what the elevations do with the light, and what is still visible of earlier paint in the spots that never got scraped properly. Then we look at whatever design guidance applies to the block, because a landmark district and an ordinary street are different situations and it is worth ten minutes to find out which one you are in.
From there it is a short list, then sample boards. Two coats, rigid board, hung on the house, left up long enough to be seen in the flat morning light and again when the afternoon sun is coming in low and warm off the west. Half the schemes that look right on a chip do not survive that, and it is much cheaper to lose them on a board than on a wall.
What you get at the end is a written sheet: each color, its manufacturer and code, and the element it belongs to. Body, trim, sash, rafter tails, porch ceiling, front door. If the scheme needs describing to anyone at the city, that sheet does most of the describing.
What We Will Not Do
We will not quote one coat over a color change and hope. We will not skip the containment and wet methods on a house built before 1978, because that housing is treated as having lead paint until a test says otherwise. And we will not tell you a repaint is urgent when the existing coating has a few years left, which happens more often than you would think, particularly on north elevations that never see the sun.
Ready to talk it through? Call (626) 554-4516 or find us at 3284 Lake Ave, Pasadena, CA 91103. Tell us the address first, because that is the answer to half the questions.