Interior Painting

Interiors, Starting With the Rooms That Fail First

Most of our interior work begins as a bathroom or a kitchen and grows outward. Someone calls about a shower ceiling, we come to look, and by the end of the walkthrough the hallway and the two bedrooms have joined the list because the color is going to change and it cannot stop at a doorway. That is a normal shape for a job and we quote it that way, in stages you can take or leave.

The wet rooms set the standard for how we do everything else. If you prepare a bathroom properly you already have the habits: clean before you coat, prime for the substrate rather than out of habit, respect dry time, and contain the mess in an occupied home.

What the Work Involves

Surface assessment with a light. We walk each room with a work light held flat to the wall. Straight-on light from the middle of the room hides ridges, old roller laps, unsanded compound and smeared caulk. Raking light finds them while they are still cheap to fix, and it is the only way to quote a room honestly.

Cleaning. Kitchens and the walls adjoining them carry cooking film well beyond the range. Hallways carry hand marks. Anything glossy carries polish and cleaning product residue. All of it comes off before primer.

Filling and patching. Cracks that follow a door corner or run on a diagonal are movement, and they need tape or mesh bedded into the compound. A crack that was simply packed reopens along the same line. Nail pops get re-fastened next to the old fixing before filling, because filling alone puts the same bump back within a year.

Plaster in the older houses. A lot of the Ocean Park and Sunset Park bungalows are lath and plaster, which behaves nothing like drywall. Plaster that has lost its key gets cut back to sound material or re-keyed rather than skimmed, and hand-applied texture gets matched by hand.

Caulking. Trim to wall, casing joints, baseboard tops. Tooled properly, cut back where the bead is too heavy, and allowed to skin before topcoat.

Priming. Bonding primer over gloss, stain blocker over water marks and tannin, and a straight sealer over new or heavily patched surfaces so the finish does not flash in the repaired areas.

Two coats. Especially over a color change. One-coat quotes come back to haunt everyone involved, because coverage that looks acceptable on the day reveals itself in six months as an uneven, patchy sheen wherever the old color was showing through.

Sheen, and How to Choose It

The ladder runs flat, eggshell, satin, semi-gloss, gloss. Going up the ladder buys you durability, washability and moisture resistance. Going down it buys you forgiveness, because a low sheen scatters light and hides an uneven wall.

In practice: flat or eggshell on ceilings and on the walls of older rooms with wavy plaster, satin in hallways and children’s rooms where you need to wash marks off, satin or semi-gloss in bathrooms and kitchens, and semi-gloss on trim and doors. Acrylic latex on trim gives you low odor and easy recoating. Alkyd gives you a harder, smoother, more furniture-like finish that levels beautifully and takes far longer to cure. Both are defensible. We ask how soon you need the room back before recommending one.

Living in the House While We Work

Floors covered and taped at the edges, plastic at doorways, sanders on vacuum extraction where dust is being made, and the site cleaned at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job. Santa Monica lots are narrow and street parking is tight, so we plan the load-in rather than blocking your neighbor.

Call (310) 668-0370 to book a walkthrough.