Interior Painting

We Find Out What the Wall Is Before We Quote It

An interior painting quote for a Pasadena house is really a quote on a wall survey. Two rooms of identical size in the same building can be a two day job and a two week job, and the difference is entirely in what is behind the paint. So the first thing we do in your house is walk the rooms with a work light held flat against the surface and a knuckle rapping every few feet.

The light finds the geometry: ridges from old patches, roller laps that stand proud, a wave in a wall where a previous repair was feathered by eye rather than sanded flat. The knuckle finds the structure. Sound plaster answers hard and dead. Plaster whose keys have snapped off behind the lath answers hollow, and that hollow area is not a paint problem at all. It is a wall that needs fastening before anything else happens.

Plaster Rooms and Board Rooms in the Same House

Most Pasadena houses of any age are now a mix. The original rooms are lath and plaster. The garage conversion, the added bathroom, the wall that came down in a nineties remodel, those are drywall. Very often the two meet in the middle of a hallway.

That junction is where we see the most avoidable failures. Plaster stands close to seven eighths of an inch off the studs and drywall stands half an inch, so where a board patch meets an original wall there is a genuine thickness difference to deal with. It has to be shimmed out or built up in compound over a wide feather, not simply taped and hoped over. A joint that is bridged rather than matched shows as a shadow line the first time low afternoon light crosses it, and once it is painted the only fix is to open it again.

The other difference is what the two surfaces want from a filler. Drywall repairs are happy with a standard joint compound, which dries by evaporation and sands easily. Plaster repairs of any depth want a setting type compound, which hardens by chemical reaction on a fixed clock, shrinks far less, and is much harder once cured. Using the soft product on a deep plaster repair is how you get a patch that sinks below the surrounding wall as it dries and telegraphs through two coats of finish.

Primer Is Not One Product

By the time we get to priming there are usually three or four different problems on the same set of walls, and they do not share an answer.

Fresh patches are porous and drink the first coat unevenly, so they get spot primed or the topcoat flashes dull over every repair. Old trim in these houses is frequently oil painted and glossy, which needs a bonding primer or a proper deglossing before waterborne enamel will hold. Water stains from a past roof leak and tannin bleed from old redwood or fir will come straight through latex forever, so they get a dedicated stain blocker rather than another coat of finish paint.

And on ceilings there is calcimine. A great many Craftsman era ceilings around here carry a chalky water based coating that modern paint bonds to perfectly well, while the coating itself lets go of the plaster underneath. That is the peeling-in-sheets failure people describe to us on the phone. It is dealt with by washing the layer back or by sealing it with a primer made specifically for the problem, and there is no shortcut through it.

Sheen, and What It Will Show

On a wall with a hand troweled history, sheen is a repair decision as much as a style one. Flat and matte finishes scatter light and forgive undulation, which is why they suit an old plaster wall that has been standing for a century and has earned a little movement. Eggshell and satin start to read the surface back to you. Semi gloss and gloss on a wall will show you every single thing underneath it.

We will paint a plaster wall in satin if you want satin. We will just tell you first what it is going to cost in extra flattening to make that a good idea, and let you decide whether the washability is worth it in that particular room.

Living in the House While We Work

Nearly all of our interior work is in occupied homes. Sanding plaster and compound produces a very fine dust that will travel to the far end of a house in a single afternoon if nothing stops it, so containment is part of the trade rather than a courtesy. Zippered plastic at the doorways, floors covered and taped at the edges, vents sealed for the duration, vacuum extraction on the sander, and a clean up at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job.

We also work around your rooms rather than your whole house at once wherever the schedule allows, so you keep somewhere to sit and somewhere to sleep the entire time.

Call (626) 974-4505 and mention the age of the house when you ring.