How painting in South Florida is different

The paint is the same paint. What is different here is everything the paint has to sit on and survive.

Almost every wall is concrete

Drive through most of the country and houses are framed and sided in wood. Drive through Miami-Dade, Broward or Palm Beach and they are concrete block with stucco over it, and so are the condominium buildings, the plazas and the warehouses.

That changes the trade. Stucco is porous, so it drinks the first coat unless it is sealed. It is alkaline when it is new or newly patched, and alkalinity attacks a coating applied too early. It moves as the building moves, so it cracks — and how those cracks are treated before coating decides whether they come back through the new finish within a year.

It also means the failures here are masonry failures: hollow stucco, spalling concrete where reinforcement has corroded, white salt deposits pushed to the surface by moisture. None of those are painting problems, and all of them turn up on a painting quote. See why coatings fail here.

There is no cold season to work around

In most of the country the exterior season is defined by temperature: paint above a minimum, stop when it gets cold, wait for spring. Manufacturers write their data sheets to that world, with minimum application temperatures in the thirties and forties.

Those minimums never bind here. What binds instead is water in three forms: afternoon storms in the wet season, dew on almost every clear night, and the dew-point margin the manufacturers require between the surface temperature and the point at which moisture condenses on it. A crew that plans a South Florida exterior around the thermometer is planning around the wrong variable — the timing guide has the rainfall normals and the published application limits side by side.

Salt is a contaminant, not a mood

Within a few miles of the Atlantic there is a salt film on every exterior surface, and paint manufacturers name salt specifically among the contaminants that cause a new coating to peel off an old one. It has to be washed off, with the right cleaner, before anything is applied.

Coastal exposure also shortens the life of whatever is applied. That is why a sensible survey looks at a building elevation by elevation rather than treating it as one surface: the side facing the water is not on the same schedule as the side facing the courtyard.

What matters more than the season is who is doing the work

Most of what decides whether a South Florida repaint lasts happens before the finish coat: the wash, the repair, the cure, the primer. All of it is invisible in a finished wall, and all of it is the first thing to disappear from a low bid.

That is also why we hold a general contractor's license rather than working as a painting company only. On most exteriors here something under the coating needs attention first, and the repair and the paint are better on one contract than argued over by two.

More on exterior painting, stucco repair and waterproofing — or read how we price a job and ask us to look at the property. We work from Miami to West Palm Beach, including Hollywood, Pompano Beach, Deerfield Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Delray Beach.