Interior Painting

Painting the Room the Cabinets Live In

Most of our interior work starts as a kitchen job and grows outward. Once the cabinet doors are hung and the profiles read crisp again, the wall behind them and the casing beside them look tired by comparison, so the rest of the room follows. That is the usual sequence and it is the right one, because the cabinetry sets the color reference and everything else gets chosen against it.

The older Pasadena houses are not drywall. A 1920s bungalow has lath and plaster, sometimes three-coat with a lime finish, and it behaves nothing like a modern wall. It is harder, it is not perfectly flat and was never meant to be, and it fails in its own particular ways. That difference is most of why a general repaint can leave an old house looking subtly wrong.

Plaster Is Not Drywall

The common failure is a hairline crack that keeps coming back. Filling it with lightweight compound and painting over it buys you about a season. A crack running diagonally off a door corner is movement, and it needs to be opened out, bedded with mesh or tape and built back in coats so the filler is not the only thing holding the joint.

The other failure is a hollow patch. When the plaster keys have snapped off the back of the lath, the whole area is floating and it will sound drummy under a knuckle. Skimming over that is pointless. It gets re-keyed with adhesive washers or cut back to sound material first. And a plaster wall carries texture from the original trowel, so a smooth flat patch in the middle of it reads as a rectangle in raking afternoon light. We match the surrounding texture before priming.

Skim coating a whole wall is sometimes the honest answer where too much of it has been patched badly over the years. It costs more than we would like to quote and it is occasionally the only way to get a wall that looks right.

Trim, Casing and the Things That Meet the Cabinets

Craftsman houses here have wide flat casing, a picture rail, and deep baseboard, often in fir that was originally stained rather than painted. If it is still stained and sound, we will usually argue for leaving it alone, because paint over old shellacked fir is a decision nobody has ever managed to reverse cheaply.

Where the trim is already painted, it gets the same treatment logic as a cabinet door: degrease, scuff or strip depending on how much film has stacked up, prime for what is underneath, then two thin coats in acrylic alkyd. Semi-gloss on trim, eggshell or satin on plaster walls, flat only on ceilings. Caulk goes into the joints and gets tooled and cut back where the bead is heavy, and it needs to skin before anything covers it.

Living In the House While We Are In It

Containment at the doorways, floors covered and taped at the edges, and the site left usable at the end of each day. We sand with vacuum extraction. On anything pre-1978 we test before we open a layer, and if it reads positive we work wet and contained.

Dry time and cure time are different numbers, and the hot dry inland air here makes that gap misleading. A wall can feel dry in an hour and still be days from hard. We schedule the coats around that rather than around what is convenient.

Call (626) 747-2676 to walk the rooms with us.