CHALLENGE
Exterior paint in Central Florida fails in a predictable order, and it is almost never the paint. Stucco is alkaline — a wall that has been patched can sit above pH 12 — and a finish coat put straight onto it saponifies and lets go in sheets. Chalk, mildew and the pollen that coats everything here in spring are a bond breaker: paint over them and the coating is stuck to the dirt, not to the wall, and it comes off with the dirt. The hairline cracks that open as a stucco wall moves are where water gets in behind the coating, and water behind a coating is what turns a repaint into a repair. Then there is the house itself: two storeys, a pool and pool deck, a screened lanai and a paver driveway directly under everything being worked on, none of which can take a single drop.
SOLUTION
Sherwin-Williams throughout, and the primer is the decision that the rest of the job rests on.
The envelope is pressure washed first — body, soffits, fascia and the lanai roof, worked from the roof itself where the reach demands it — to take off chalk, mildew and pollen, and then given time to dry. A wall still holding water traps it under the coating, and that blisters weeks later when nobody is there to see it start. Cracks are opened out, filled and finished back to the texture around them rather than skimmed over; a crack painted over is a crack that is visible again by the second summer. Bare and patched stucco is primed with Loxon. That is the part that matters and it is not interchangeable: it is an alkali-resistant masonry primer, so the finish coat bonds to the wall instead of to the alkali blooming out of it, and it seals a porous, absorbent surface so the topcoat builds a film rather than soaking in unevenly.
Masking is where the owner decides what they think of the crew, and on this house it was most of the preparation. Doors and garage doors papered and taped, glass and hardware covered, every light fixture wrapped, and paper run out over the pavers and the pool deck under each elevation as it came up. Nothing is masked the night before on a job with afternoon storms in the forecast — it is masked the morning it is painted and pulled the same day, while the film is still fresh enough to release cleanly instead of tearing a cut line.
Then the coats, cut and rolled or sprayed and back-rolled by surface: body, trim, fascia and soffit, the entry arch, the front door and the garage doors, each in its own sheen. Recoat times are read off the can for the temperature and humidity of that day and not off the schedule, and cut lines are run by hand where two colours meet — tape gives a straight line, a steady hand gives a clean one.
RESULT
A full exterior repaint on a 4,239-square-foot two-storey stucco home in Ocoee, Orange County: body, trim, fascia and soffit, the entry arch, the front door and both garage doors, over six days on site. Sherwin-Williams materials on a Loxon-primed substrate, which is what makes the difference between a coating that is attached to the wall and one that is attached to what was on the wall. The pool, the pool deck, the screened lanai and the paver driveway all came through it clean.
Projects
