Five reasons to choose Smart Coat

Choosing a contractor is mostly an exercise in reading documents. Here is what is in ours, and why each part is there.

The estimate is a document, not a number

Most quotes for a repaint are one figure and a paragraph. Ours is a written scope: what is being washed and how, what is being repaired, which primer goes where and why, how many coats of what, and what is excluded. Every line is priced.

That is not thoroughness for its own sake. It is the only form in which you can compare two bids. A number on its own tells you nothing about whether the other contractor intends to prime the chalked wall or paint over it, and the difference between those two decisions is the difference between a coating that lasts and one that fails in a season. Read how we price a job for what actually moves the figure.

One license covers the repair and the paint

Smart Coat holds a Florida Certified General Contractor license. Painting itself is not a state-licensed trade in Florida, so most companies bidding your repaint are not licensed contractors in the sense that matters for the work under the paint — the stucco, the concrete, the sealant joints, the waterproofing.

We are, which means the repair scope and the paint scope go on one contract, one schedule and one set of paperwork. On a condominium or an HOA building, where permits and engineer-sealed drawings are involved, that is not a convenience; it is the difference between one contract and three. Our guide for condo boards sets out where that line falls.

The schedule names its constraints

A repaint schedule that promises a finish date without mentioning the weather or the cure times is a schedule that is going to change. Ours says what it depends on: how long a stucco repair has to cure before it can be coated, what the coating's recoat window is, and which days are held for rain in the wet season.

We would rather have the awkward conversation at the estimate than the awkward phone call in week three. The timing guide explains what those constraints actually are, with the manufacturers' own figures.

Your property is protected, and left clean every day

Furniture, floors, fixtures, landscaping and pool cages get protected before anything is opened. At the end of each working day the site is put back in a state you can live in — not at the end of the job, at the end of each day.

On occupied buildings this is most of what residents actually experience of a project. A community repaint is judged on whether people could park, walk to their door and open their windows, far more than on the finish.

The people who priced it are the people running it

Smart Coat is a family-owned and operated company. The person who walks your property and writes the scope is the person you talk to while the work is running. Nothing gets handed to a subcontractor you have never met with a scope they never read.

What we do not claim

It is worth saying what is not on this page. We do not publish a number of years in business, a project count or a star rating, because those numbers are repeated inconsistently across the web and we would rather state nothing than state something we cannot stand behind. There are no testimonials on this site that we wrote ourselves — our reviews live on our Google profile, where the people who left them can still edit them.

What we do publish is checkable: the license, the insurance certificate, the scope, and the sources behind every figure in our guides.

Read more about the company, see how a project runs, or ask us to look at the job.