Painting

Florida sun is the real clock. Ultraviolet light breaks down the glue that holds paint together, and our sun is strong nine or ten months a year. Salt air near the beaches makes it worse, because salt settles on the surface and holds moisture against the paint.

Two easy tests tell you where you stand. First, rub your palm or a dry dark rag on a sunny wall. If it comes away with a chalky white film, the paint is breaking down and it is time to start planning. Second, walk the house and look at the caulk lines around windows, around door trim, and where siding boards meet. If that caulk is cracked, shrunken, or pulled away from the surface, water is getting in behind the paint, and the clock speeds up a lot.

When you do repaint, good paint is worth the money here. A quality 100 percent acrylic exterior paint runs roughly $55 to $90 a gallon, and the top lines can be over $100 at full list price. Paint stores run sales often, so it is worth asking when the next one is. Sherwin-Williams Duration or Emerald, Benjamin Moore Aura or Regal Select Exterior, and Behr Marquee all hold their color and resist mildew far better than a $30 gallon. Cheap paint in Florida sun turns a ten-year job into a five-year job.

Do not stretch a repaint past the point where bare wood or bare stucco is showing. Once water is getting into bare wood, you are paying to replace boards, not just paint them.

One more honest note. If the work means being on a ladder above the first floor, or on a roofline, that alone is a good reason to let someone else handle it. A fall costs more than a paint job.

If you want a second opinion on whether yours can wait another season, Dominic will come look and tell you straight. Free estimates, 727-421-2344, call or text.

Sheen just means how shiny the paint dries. There are five common ones, from dullest to shiniest: flat or matte, eggshell, satin, semi-gloss, and gloss.

Ceilings get flat, always. Flat hides waves, seams, and old patches better than anything else, and nobody washes a ceiling. If you have a popcorn or knockdown textured ceiling, flat is the only sensible choice, because any shine turns every bump into a shadow.

One safety note about popcorn ceilings. Painting one is fine. Scraping or sanding one is not, at least not before you know what it is. Textured ceiling material installed before the mid-1980s can contain asbestos, and the only way to know is to have a small sample tested by a lab. Testing usually runs $40 to $75. Do not dry-scrape an old popcorn ceiling and find out afterward.

Bedrooms, living rooms, and dining rooms do well in eggshell. It has a very soft glow, hides wall imperfections reasonably well, and you can still wipe a scuff off with a damp cloth.

Hallways, kitchens, kids' rooms, and laundry rooms should be satin. Those walls get touched, bumped, and splashed. Satin takes a real cleaning without burnishing, which means it does not leave a shiny spot where you scrubbed.

Bathrooms in Florida are their own problem. Between hot showers and our outdoor humidity, bathroom walls stay damp far longer than they do up north. Use satin or semi-gloss, and look for a product made for bathrooms with mildew resistance built in, such as Sherwin-Williams Duration Home or Zinsser Perma-White. Run the exhaust fan for twenty minutes after every shower and the paint lasts about twice as long.

Trim, baseboards, window casings, and doors get semi-gloss. It is tough, it wipes clean, and the slight shine is what visually separates the trim from the wall.

One point worth repeating: shinier paint shows more. If your walls are older and full of patches, dropping down one step in sheen will make the whole room look better than any amount of extra sanding.

Most exterior paints want the surface they are going onto to be cooler than about 90 degrees. On a July afternoon in St. Petersburg, a west-facing stucco wall in full sun can reach 120 degrees or more. Paint hitting a surface that hot skins over instantly, which gives you lap marks, poor sticking, and a finish that starts peeling in two years.

So chase the shade instead of chasing the clock. Paint the east side of the house first thing in the morning while it is still cool, move to the north side, take the west side in the late morning, and save the south wall for whenever it has shade. A cheap infrared thermometer, the kind you point at a surface, costs $20 to $30 at any home store and takes the guessing out of it.

For the storms, the number that matters is how long the paint needs before rain hits it. Most quality acrylic exterior paints are rain-safe about two hours after they go on in normal weather, but our humidity stretches that out. Give yourself three hours of margin. In practice that means you are done spreading paint by one or two in the afternoon, June through September.

A few more things that catch people here. Do not paint if the wall is still damp from last night's rain or from morning dew, because trapped moisture causes blistering. Turn off the irrigation zones for the side of the house you are painting, and leave them off for a full day. And if you see brown or tan streaks running down fresh paint after a rain, that is usually surfactant leaching, which is just water-soluble ingredients in the paint rising to the surface. It is not a ruined job. It rinses off with a garden hose.

There is a difference between dry and cured, and it causes most of the damage people do to their own fresh paint.

Dry means the water has evaporated and the surface is no longer tacky. That takes about an hour on a wall. Cured means the paint has finished hardening into a tough film, and that is a slow chemical process that keeps going for three or four weeks.

Florida humidity slows all of it down. On a muggy day with the windows open, a coat that the can says you can recoat in four hours may really want six. If the paint feels even slightly rubbery or cool to the touch, it is not ready. Running the air conditioner and a box fan in the room is the single best thing you can do, because air conditioning pulls moisture out of the air.

Here are the practical rules once you are done. Give it a full day before you rehang pictures or put switch plate covers back on, and snug those cover screws gently so you do not crush soft paint. Wait two to three days before pushing a couch, headboard, or bookshelf against the wall, and put a folded towel between the furniture and the wall for the first week.

Freshly painted doors and cabinet doors are the worst offenders, because two painted surfaces pressed together can stick and then tear when you open them. Painters call that blocking. Lay a strip of wax paper along the latch edge of the door and along the shelf edges for the first week.

For cleaning, use nothing more than a barely damp cloth for the first two weeks. Real scrubbing, with any kind of cleaner, should wait a full month.

Paint-and-primer-in-one is a real product, but it only does one job well. It is a thicker paint that covers nicely over an existing painted surface that is sound. It is not a bonding primer, and it is not a stain blocker.

Use a real primer in these situations.

Bare drywall, or new drywall patches. Drywall paper and joint compound soak up paint at completely different rates. Skip the primer and every patch shows through as a dull spot, which painters call flashing. A gallon of drywall primer such as Sherwin-Williams ProBlock or Zinsser Bulls Eye 1-2-3 runs about $30 to $40 and fixes it.

Water stains, rust stains, smoke, or nicotine. These bleed straight through latex paint no matter how many coats you put on. You need a shellac-based or oil-based stain blocker. Zinsser B-I-N is the standard one. It smells strong, so open the windows and run a fan while you use it.

Bare wood, especially anything that will sit outside in our weather. Wood needs a primer that seals the grain, and any knots need a spot of shellac primer, or they will bleed a yellow-brown circle through your finish coat within a year.

Glossy or slick surfaces, like old semi-gloss trim, cabinets, or tile. Here you want a bonding primer, which is made to grab onto slick surfaces. INSL-X STIX and Kilz Adhesion are the common ones. Regular paint simply will not hold on.

Big color changes, in either direction.

One extra Florida note. If you are painting the interior walls of a concrete block house and you can see hairline cracks or old patched spots, a masonry-friendly primer evens everything out and keeps the topcoat from looking blotchy.

When in doubt, primer is the cheapest insurance in the whole job.

Dark colors, and reds most of all, are hard to cover because the pigments that make them are strong and slightly see-through. Piling on white paint fights that the slow way.

The trick the trades use is gray-tinted primer. Ask the paint counter to tint a gallon of primer to a medium gray. They will know the shade. Gray kills the red completely, and your light topcoat then only has to cover gray, which it does easily in two coats.

Going the other direction, dark over light, ask them to tint the primer toward your new color instead. Deep base paints have very little white pigment in them, so they hide poorly over a white wall.

A few things that make the job go faster. Use a roller cover with the right nap, which is the thickness of the fuzz: 3/8 inch for smooth walls, 1/2 inch for lightly textured walls, and 3/4 inch for heavy knockdown texture, which is common in newer Florida homes. Do not overwork the roller. Stretching thin paint is the main cause of a patchy look. Load it, lay the paint on in a section about three feet square, roll it out evenly, and move on.

Let each coat dry the full recoat time listed on the can. Recoating too early over a dark color can lift the coat underneath and leave you with a streaked mess that needs sanding.

And check your work at night with a lamp held near the wall at an angle. Dark walls hide thin spots in daylight and show them to you the day after you have put the roller away.

Cutting in means painting the edge freehand with a brush. The tool matters more than the talent. Buy a 2 1/2 inch angled sash brush, such as a Purdy Clearcut Glide or a Wooster Shortcut, for $15 to $20. A cheap brush will not hold a clean edge no matter how steady your hand is.

The technique: load the bottom third of the bristles, tap the excess off inside the can rather than dragging it across the rim, lay the paint down about a quarter inch away from the edge, then make one slow pass that pushes the tip of the bristles right into the corner. Long, slow strokes. Rushing is what makes the wobbles.

If you would rather tape, use the right tape and treat it properly. Green FrogTape or blue 3M 2090 for ordinary surfaces, and yellow delicate-surface tape for anything freshly painted or for wallpaper. Press the edge down hard with a putty knife or a plastic card. Then seal that edge by brushing a thin pass of the existing wall color over it first. That thin pass fills the tiny gap under the tape, so your new color cannot bleed under it.

Timing matters when you pull the tape. Either pull it while the paint is still slightly tacky, within about an hour, pulling it back on itself at a low angle rather than straight out, or let the paint dry completely and score along the tape line with a utility blade before you pull. What you want to avoid is yanking hard on tape stuck in half-hardened paint, because that is when it takes flakes of your new paint with it.

One caution for older Florida homes. On an aging painted baseboard or a textured wall, even good tape can pull off brittle old paint. Test a six inch piece in a corner first.

Here is the arithmetic, so you can run it on any room.

Add up the length of all four walls: 12 plus 14 plus 12 plus 14 is 52 feet. Multiply by the 8 foot ceiling height and you get 416 square feet. Subtract about 21 square feet for a standard door, and about 15 square feet for each average window. With one door and two windows, you are at roughly 365 square feet of actual wall.

A gallon covers 350 to 400 square feet on a smooth wall in one coat. On knockdown texture or popcorn, figure closer to 300, because texture has more surface area than it looks like it does.

So for two coats on those walls, buy 2 gallons. Two gallons is usually cheaper than a gallon plus two quarts, and it leaves you touch-up paint for later. For the ceiling, 12 times 14 is 168 square feet, and one gallon of flat ceiling paint will do two coats with a little left over.

One tip on keeping the color even. If you are buying more than one gallon of the same color, ask the store to box them, which means pouring them together into a five gallon bucket and stirring. Two gallons tinted on different days can be very slightly different from each other, and boxing them makes that impossible to see on the wall.

Supplies for a room like this run about $50 to $60 beyond the paint: a 9 inch roller frame and two covers, a 2 1/2 inch angled brush, a tray or a bucket with a grid, painter's tape, a drop cloth, and a tube of paintable acrylic caulk for the gaps along the trim.

Paint does not peel because it got tired. It peels because it lost its grip. The reason is usually one of these.

The wall was not clean. Old exterior paint in our climate builds up a chalky powder, plus a film of mildew and pollen. New paint over that sticks to the powder instead of the wall, and later comes off in sheets. The fix is washing, and on chalky walls, a bonding primer before the paint.

Water coming from behind. Look at what is above the peeling area. Cracked caulk at a window, a gap in the trim, or a gutter overflowing during our afternoon downpours will soak the wood or stucco underneath and push the paint off from the back. Peeling that runs in a vertical stripe is almost always this.

Sprinklers. An irrigation head that sprays the wall every single morning will ruin paint in two or three years, and if you are on well water it leaves rusty orange staining too. Adjust the heads.

Painting hot surfaces. Paint put on a west wall at 110 degrees never forms a proper film in the first place.

Bare wood or bare stucco that never got primed.

Builder-grade paint. Plenty of Florida homes were painted once with the cheapest coating available, and it does not have the sun resistance to last here.

Fixing it properly means scraping the loose paint back to something solid, feathering the edges with 80 grit sandpaper, priming the bare spots, cutting out and redoing the bad caulk joints, then two coats of good paint. Spot-painting over a peeling wall buys you one season, no more.

One safety item before you start scraping. If your house was built before 1978, the old layers underneath may contain lead paint. Do not dry-scrape or power-sand it. A hardware store lead test swab costs a few dollars, and if it comes up positive, the safe way is to keep the surface wet while you work, catch the debris on plastic, and wear a proper respirator, not a dust mask.

If you would rather have someone look at it and tell you which of these is happening at your house, Dominic does free estimates at 727-421-2344. If it turns out to be something outside of painting, he will tell you that too.

A screened lanai looks like one project and is really three.

The concrete floor is the one people get wrong. Regular exterior wall paint will not survive foot traffic, wet feet, and Florida heat. Use a porch and floor enamel, such as Behr Premium Porch and Patio or Sherwin-Williams Porch and Floor Enamel, or step up to a two-part epoxy kit for the hardest finish. Either way, the concrete has to be clean, and it has to be etched, which means roughened up slightly so the coating can bite into it. Pressure wash it, then use an etching product from the paint aisle. You do not need to handle raw acid to do this. New concrete needs to be at least 28 days old before you coat it. And if you can still see dark spots after washing, those are oil or mildew, and they have to come out first, because coating over them just traps them.

The block or stucco walls take a masonry primer such as Loxon, then two coats of 100 percent acrylic exterior paint. Fill any hairline cracks in block walls first, using an elastomeric patch, which is a stretchy patching compound that can move with the wall, or a sanded acrylic caulk.

The aluminum cage frame is where most do-it-yourself lanai jobs fail. Aluminum, whether bare or factory-finished, needs a bonding primer made for metal, such as Rust-Oleum Clean Metal Primer, and then a topcoat labeled direct-to-metal, which means it is formulated to go straight onto metal. Scuff the frame with a scuff pad, wipe it down, prime, then topcoat. Skip the primer and you will have flaking after one rainy season.

One thing not to paint: the screen itself. Painted screen sags, clogs up, and holds dirt. If the screen is stretched out or stained, replacing that panel is cheaper and looks far better than paint.

Cabinet paint fails for one reason: something stopped it from sticking. Kitchen cabinets carry years of cooking grease you cannot see, and the doors are slick from their factory finish.

The order of work matters. Take the doors and drawer fronts off and label each one with a piece of tape on the back edge, with a number and a note like upper left. Remove the hinges and pulls. Wash every surface with a degreaser. A TSP substitute or Krud Kutter, both sold in the paint aisle, will do it. Rinse afterward. Then scuff-sand everything with 220 grit sandpaper until the shine is gone, vacuum, and wipe with a tack cloth.

Primer next, and it has to be a bonding primer, meaning one made to grip slick surfaces. INSL-X Cabinet Coat primer, Zinsser B-I-N shellac, and Kilz Adhesion all work. If your cabinets are oak with an open grain and you want a smooth look, this is the point where you fill the grain with a thin skim of spackle and sand again.

For the finish, use a real cabinet enamel: Benjamin Moore Advance, Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel, or INSL-X Cabinet Coat. These level out brush marks as they dry and cure much harder than wall paint. Two thin coats, not one thick one. A 4 inch foam mini-roller plus a good brush for the corners gets you very close to a sprayed look.

Then be patient. Cabinet enamels feel dry in a few hours but need about a week before hard use, and a full month to reach their final hardness. Put wax paper or felt bumper dots where the doors meet the frames for the first week.

One Florida-specific thing. Lay the doors flat to dry in an air-conditioned room, not in the garage. Garage humidity in July will leave you with a soft, tacky finish that never fully hardens.

If you would rather not lose a weekend to it, Dominic paints cabinets. Call or text 727-421-2344 for a free estimate.

Our climate is close to ideal for mildew: warm, humid, and wet almost daily in summer. It shows up first on the walls that stay shaded and stay damp the longest, which is usually the north side, under roof overhangs, behind shrubs, and anywhere a sprinkler mists the wall.

Here is a quick way to tell mildew from ordinary dirt. Put a drop of household bleach on a dark spot and wait a minute. If it lightens or disappears, it is mildew. If it stays dark, it is dirt or staining.

To clean it, mix one part household bleach to three parts water, and add a small squirt of dish soap so the mix clings to the wall. Wet the plants and the wall down with plain water first. Apply the mix with a pump sprayer or a soft brush, let it sit about ten minutes without letting it dry on the wall, then rinse well. Wear eye protection and gloves, and pick a calm day so it does not blow back at you. Never mix bleach with any cleaner that contains ammonia, because that combination makes a toxic gas. If you would rather not handle bleach at all, store-bought products like Wet and Forget or Jomax do the same job with less scrubbing and are gentler on landscaping.

Go easy with a pressure washer. Anything much over 1500 psi on stucco or older wood siding drives water into the wall and can strip the paint right off. A garden hose and a soft brush is usually enough.

If the mildew comes right back within a couple of months, the real problem is moisture. Trim the shrubs back a foot from the wall, redirect the sprinklers, and the next time you repaint, use a paint with mildewcide in it.

One important distinction. Dark growth on the inside of a wall, a musty smell indoors, or staining that keeps coming back through interior paint is a different matter entirely. That should be looked at by a Florida-licensed mold assessor, not painted over. Florida licenses those people specifically, and a real assessment is worth having before anyone touches it.

Buyers are trying to picture their own furniture in a room. Strong colors make that harder, and a dark accent wall reads as work they will have to undo.

Inside, the reliable choices are warm whites and light greiges, greige being the gray-beige in between the two. Sherwin-Williams Alabaster and Agreeable Gray, Benjamin Moore White Dove and Revere Pewter, and Behr Swiss Coffee all photograph well and get along with almost any flooring. In Florida, lean warm rather than cool. Our light is bright and a little blue, and cool grays that look sophisticated in a showroom can read cold and gloomy in a room with a big sliding glass door.

Paint the whole main living area one color and let the trim be a crisp white in semi-gloss. Continuous color makes a house feel larger, which is worth more than any single accent wall.

Outside, light colors do double duty. They look current, and they reflect solar heat instead of soaking it up, which keeps the walls cooler and takes a little load off the air conditioner. Dark charcoal and deep navy houses look striking in photographs, but in full Tampa Bay sun those colors fade noticeably faster and start chalking sooner. If you want a dark exterior, budget for repainting more often.

The front door is the exception. A confident color there, a deep teal, black, a warm navy, or a brick red, gives the listing photo a focal point, and it costs one quart of paint plus an afternoon.

One caution. If you are in a deed-restricted neighborhood or a condo association, check the approved exterior color list before you buy anything. Being told to repaint the whole house is an expensive lesson.

It depends entirely on how much time the paint had.

Under an hour is real trouble. The paint is still mostly water, and on a vertical surface it will run, streak, or wash off in sheets. Once it dries you will be left with drip lines and thin spots. The repair is to let it dry all the way, sand the runs smooth with 120 grit, spot-prime anywhere that went down to bare surface, and recoat that section. If the house was built before 1978, sand wet rather than dry, since the older layers underneath may contain lead paint.

One to three hours is a gamble that usually pays off with a quality 100 percent acrylic. You may end up with patchy sheen or a slightly mottled look. Give it a few days, then look at it on an overcast day before you decide whether it needs another coat.

Over three hours and you are generally fine. What you might see instead is surfactant leaching: tan, brown, or glossy streaks running down the fresh paint, sometimes a little sticky to the touch. Those are water-soluble ingredients in the paint rising to the surface, and they are extremely common in our humidity. Do not scrub them and do not repaint. Rinse gently with a garden hose. If they come back, rinse again a week later. They stop on their own.

The practical Florida habit is simple. Check the radar in the morning, not the night before. Our summer storms build in the afternoon, so aim to have the brushes washed by two o'clock. Watch the wind too, because a sudden cool gust often means a storm cell is about thirty minutes out.

Also stop earlier in the afternoon than you think you need to, even on a dry day. Heavy dew settling on paint that went on at six in the evening causes the same blotchy problems that rain does.