San Diego’s commercial painters have jobs that are surprisingly challenging, requiring a mix of detail-orientation (to make sure that everything that should get painted does and vice versa), physical ability (to go up and down ladders and paint at odd angles), and aesthetic sense (to assist clients who know their goal but don’t have a design in mind.) These dynamic individuals don’t necessarily have any specialized schooling, but most of them that have been in the business for any considerable length of time have keen instincts for what looks right with what and how to make that look a reality.
San Diego painters come in a variety of specializations, from those who work exclusively on new builds but can’t (or won’t) redesign an existing room to those who have a specific niche in Victorian home restoration painting or parking lot striping. Hundreds work alone, but most are part of a team. The work tends to be seasonal, so many have second jobs they hold during the winter months — the others tend to have a well-developed client base of interior jobs that can support them through the wet season.
Depending on the specific task, painters might spend all day or a relatively small amount of time doing non-painting functions, from caulking and weatherproofing to repairing drywall or re-hanging gutters. They tend to be general handymen in addition to skilled painters — after all, the goal is aesthetic, and a well-painted gutter that’s still hanging at an odd angle isn’t going to be pleasant to the eye.
The amount of tasks that are considered ‘painting’ might also surprise you as well. From actually applying paint to a wall to pressure washing, refinishing furniture, waterproofing decks, and even silk screening T-shirts or tablecloths, if it involves using a simple tool to apply a substance to a surface, San Diego’s professional painters can and generally will do it.
Commercial painters in particular tend toward the larger jobs, but that’s not a good reason to avoid them if you’ve got a home in need of painting. They might not take your job offhand if they’ve got plenty of clientele — but if they do take it, you know they’ll do it right and professionally the first time through, and that can be worth a lot.
When you own a rental property, whether it’s a single home or an apartment complex, you need to make certain that every aspect of your property is well maintained. That’s why you want to hire only the best San Diego property management painting services. There’s no going back if you go cheap and get a pile of college students who don’t know how to paint without making a mess of things.
Finding the Best
While the contractor that is the “best” will vary depending on your circumstances, there are several easy ways to ensure that the group you’re talking to is, at the minimum, not going to disappoint you. Fortunately, there’s a short, useful checklist that can help with that.
- Are they licensed? — Contactors that aren’t licensed to do business in California are a dime a dozen, but they also have a tendency to vanish without really finishing the job.
- How long have they been in business? — A group that’s only been around for a few months might be cruising on a large startup fund. One that’s been around for several years is obviously surviving because it does good business.
- Get quotes from a couple of companies, and be sure that they’re offering similar services so you can get a good idea of what the job should cost.
- Insist on a ‘turnkey’ estimate rather than an hourly one. There’s no reason, once they understand the scope of the job, that a property management painting crew shouldn’t be able to give you a good estimate of the total cost in both time and money.
- Ask the company if there’s a job they’ve done recently that you can examine. Especially for a commercial job, there’s often a building you can walk into and look at up close. If their work is tidy and the lines look good, you’re probably going to be happy with the final results on your building as well. li>
Most importantly, once you find a company that you can work with, stick with them. Good San Diego interior painters just aren’t easy do find, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and effort if you keep tabs the company of your choice.
San Diego’s commercial facilities, particularly busy and profitable ones, can see hundreds or thousands of people every day. It’s of vital importance that the establishment remains in tip-top condition, or they can lose customers. After all, who wants to go shop at a place with peeling paint, chipped concrete, and a sign that doesn’t light up?
Part of the team responsible for keeping such a store looking (and thus operating) well are the commercial painting contracts San Diego businesses hire to maintain the look of the buildings ‘teriors (ex- and in-.) These elite crews do a huge number of jobs for the business owners.
Keeping Things Appealing
San Diego’s commercial painters ensure that the facility in question (and often it’s associated parking lot or other immediate environs) is safe, pleasant, and attractive to customers, tenants, or whomever else is using the building. They might repaint curbs and warning signs in order to keep things safe. They might repaint the outside of a building to keep things aesthetically pleasing but also watertight, mold resistant, or even soundproof! In that way, they can keep things not only looking good, but smelling and sounding better as well.
Keeping Things Safe
In institutions like colleges, San Diego’s professional commercial paint crews will often be asked to re-seal the waterproofing on balconies and decks. Warehouses frequently need a new coat of rustproofing on catwalks. Hospitals need special antibacterial wall paint in some wards. High-rise apartment and/or condominiums often request special paint on the building’s exterior that is designed to reflect light away and keep the apartments from getting too hot in the afternoon sun.
Keeping Customers Coming
One service that surprisingly few clients take advantage of: most of San Diego’s commercial painters can consult with a business about how to use color and design to maximize the appeal of their space. Whether it’s what color the back wall should be in order to attract attention to the expensive items toward the rear of a furniture store, or how to help direct people to unconsciously turn right when they enter the store’s door, commercial painters can help you accomplish your goals with visual flair.
If you’re a home or condo owner and you have to deal with the demands of a home-owners association (HOA) or the condo landlord, you might already know how annoying they can be when it comes time to repaint your residence — inside or out. Many HOAs have rules that restrict the homes in their demesnes to certain palettes or even specific colors. Paint your place the wrong color, and they can legally force you to repaint it (and if you don’t, they can take your home away from you!)
If you don’t know what your HOA or landlord’s standards are, there’s no substitute for just asking them. They might also restrict the ‘style’ in addition to the color, further limiting you to certain styles like Art Deco or Post-Modern. Rarely, they might even require a uniform color all around the interior of a home. There’s really no limit to the power they can exercise over your home.
With all of those restrictions hanging over your head, you might feel that you don’t have any options. That’s where a talented San Diego house painter comes in. A clever painter can find a way to give you the kind of design you’re looking for without going against the HOA. Painting contractors in San Diego are used to that kind of thing; there are some pretty finicky home owners associations around here.
Trying to find a workaround on your own can often come off to the HOA like you’re searching for loopholes, and can trigger a lengthy legal battle if they think you’re deliberately flouting the rules. On the other hand, a painting contractor will unhesitatingly sit down with the HOA and negotiate with precise plans and often even pictures of what they intend to do — and that can go a long way toward alleviating the association’s concerns.
Ask your neighbors if they’ve repainted recently, and if they did, who they used as a painting contractor. Chances are good that if they had a good experience with a particular group, so will you.
Before you go painting your home without hiring an interior painter, San Diego‘s homeowners would like to share a few words with you. There is a spot of advice that many of us can give you that you might not hear from the painting crew, and you’d do well to pay attention.
Painting Ain’t Easy
It’s not an easy thing, painting the interior of a home. You could just slap a bunch of paint on the walls, but you’ll end up with paint in all kinds of places you don’t want it — on electrical outlets, ceiling lamps, doorknobs, and more. You’ll probably also end up without paint in important places like behind the art and in the corners. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up working your butt off to get paint off the floor, out of your hair, and so forth.
Professionals Bring the Beauty
Compare that to what happens when professional San Diego house painters come in to do the job. They bring a group to cut the duration of the job. They bring specific tools like corner brushes, painter’s tape, all the right ladders, and everything else they need.
Always Bring Protection
Among those tools is a set of items that homeowners almost always assume they don’t need — but the professionals always bring and use. That would be the protective covers that go over the furniture, carpet, and small animals (just kidding) before the painters get to work. Not only does this guarantee that there won’t be any disasters, but it also helps the professional crew work faster, because they don’t have to worry about every particle of pains that falls off of their brush between strokes.
In AND Out
Finally, a professional construction crew isn’t going to leave your room in disarray. Not only do they bring the tools and protect your home, they also swiftly and efficiently clean up when they’re gone. Anything they have to take with them will get wrapped up in those protective tarps and tossed in the nearest Dumpster on the way back to the office. When they leave, the most you have to do is wait for a tiny bit of paint to dry before you’ll be ready to jump back into your space and enjoy its new look for yourself.
Getting your house painted is like getting a makeover for your residence. You wouldn’t ever go to a salon and ask them to give you ’80s hair and Lee Press-On Nails — and trends in residential frontage are no less exacting You don’t want your home to look like a throwback — but how do you know what’s trendy in a place like San Diego?
Well hopefully, you’d be able to find a San Diego house painter who knew the scene enough to help you get your home painted right. But just in case you end up hiring someone who is more of a roller-wielder and less of an artist, here’s a few things you should be able to communicate to your painting crew about the latest looks.
Outside and Inside are Completely Different Realms
Inside these days is all about splashes (or sometimes entire walls) of striking color against a relatively invisible ‘background field’ of beige, taupe, or off-white. On the outside, however, it’s all about somewhat ordinary-looking shutters and accents — say, white or grey — against a wall of fairly vivid color (though your local HOA might disagree and insist on something more low-key).
Paint For The Space
Every kind of space deserves it’s own unique paint treatment. For example, if your home is quite small, a bright palette of pastels will keep the light reflecting off of the walls and make the space seem bigger. If you have starkly-colored furniture or you want to focus attention on the art, a basic white or off-white is an easy choice.
What Can Your Paint Do For You?
Children’s bedrooms and playrooms should be vividly colored to encourage an energetic environment. People work best in a room with forest green on the walls or ceiling, but not if they have to look straight at it. A bit of caramel-color in the exercise room can encourage a feeling of grounded-ness that can help increase focus on the workout. Splashes of maroon in the living area gives a feel of regality and bonhomme to a gathering.
In short, if you don’t know what your repaint is going to accomplish, it might be wise to plan out what you want the results to be, and then go back and try to plan out how to get there with the help of your San Diego house painting crew.
The Internet is full of horror stories about house painting mistakes made by both amateur an professional San Diego house painters. They range from a glaringly wrong color choice to painting the wrong house. Of course, an error that grotesque is very rare, but there are a few other mistakes that happen all too often, in both DIY and professional house painting.
The honest truth is that the vast majority of painting companies in San Diego don’t make egregious errors — they’re professionals, after all. But accidents to happen. Here are some of the most commonly-reported errors professional painters hear:
You damaged my property!
The most troubling of the report that a painter can get is that they left the property less valuable than it was when they arrived. Exterior damage to shutters and gutters is relatively common; interior painters are more often told they’ve damaged the carpets or the furniture. Regardless of the precise nature of the damage, a professional painter will be bonded — which means they have insurance that will correct the damage they’ve dealt. Accidents may happen, but professionals are ready for that circumstance.
This paint looks awful!
Your assumption when you hire a professional painter is that they will know how to paint your house so that it looks visually appealing from all angles — and that they’ll actually do that. This isn’t any accident, however — if a San Diego house painter doesn’t take the time to check their work from all angles, they’re just not doing a very good job.
You left XYZ all out of whack!
Painting a home — interior or exterior — isn’t a simple job. There are always things that need to be moved and painted under or taped over and painted around. For a professional crew, this kind of thing is part and parcel of the job, and making sure everything is just as it was when they arrived is a point of pride.
These kinds of complaints are the reason why you hire a professional to paint your home instead of going to the Home Despot and picking a few gallons of Meditative Magenta for your living room and/or balcony. Don’t let them happen to your home!
Commercial painting and house painting are different on many levels — the latter is a matter of personal taste and only really affects your family, friends, and neighbors; the former affects the public perception of your business, and through that, the amount of money your business makes. Commercial painters in San Diego are well aware of the responsibility they have to ensure that they don’t cost their clients money by giving the wrong impression with their paint jobs.
Corporate office, restaurants, shopping malls, and so forth are all going with a very modern theme these days — largely monochromatic with carefully planned lines or shapes of color. That’s because they’ve discovered that this kind of simple but powerful theme is easy to visually identify and strikes a chord in people’s minds — and that means more repeat customers, especially ones from out-of-town who just happened to see a familiar store in the distance.
Color in business should always take into account not just the general effects of the color on people’s frames of mind (i.e. red makes you irritable), but also the specific connotations each color has with the business in question. For example, green is a wonderful color for a nonprofit organization that is working to help keep the local waters clean — but it’s a horrible color for a butcher, because it associates first with meat gone bad.
Hiring a San Diego painting contractor for your professional jobs isn’t just a matter, then, of hiring people who will be technically accurate. You must also hire contractors who know what effects their work will have.
The critical element to remember in any professional commercial job is that the painters’ goal needs to be to please the customer — because that, in turn, will please the boss. That means more than just picking the right colors; it means making sure that all touchable surfaces are tactile-friendly (no tacky-surfaced paints), all chips and scars in the walls are filled in and smoothed over before they’re painted, and many other minor details are attended to.
Stepping back and putting yourself into the shoes of the customer isn’t often a skill that is associated with painters — but when it comes to your business, it’s a necessity.
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San Diego Painters | san_diego_paint March 10, 2012 | 
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