02
High-End Residential Painting
Our other designated specialty. Interior and exterior repaints in houses people are still living in, which is a different kind of care from a job site.
Chapter 01
Why an occupied repaint is a different job
On a new build, the house belongs to the trades. On a repaint, it belongs to a family, and everything about the work has to bend around that. People still need to get to the kitchen. The dog still needs to go out. Somebody is on a call in the room next door. A crew that treats a finished home the way it would treat a shell is the single most common complaint homeowners have about painters, and it has nothing to do with how well anybody can paint.
The practical failures are predictable. Dust from sanding that was never contained, so it ends up on every horizontal surface in the house. Furniture moved without a plan for putting it back. Hardware taken off and not labelled. A ladder left leaning against a wall overnight, marking it.
We have been working in occupied homes across Palm Beach and Broward counties since 1990. Most of the discipline below exists because of things that went wrong on somebody's job a long time ago.
Two Creative Images painters on extension ladders working the exterior wall and window trim of a luxury Boca Raton home beside a water feature
Taping, tarping, and the cut line
Nothing opens until the room is protected. Floors covered, furniture moved and wrapped, trim and glass masked, and the edges taped before the first can is opened. Our customers write about this part more often than they write about the paint itself, which tells you how routinely it is skipped elsewhere. One of them put it as treating your house like it is their own, and that is roughly the standard.
Then the cut line. Where the wall meets the ceiling, where the wall meets the trim, where two colours meet at an inside corner, the line is cut in by hand. It is slower than masking everything and spraying, and it is the reason a room reads as finished rather than merely painted. It is also the thing a homeowner's eye returns to for the next ten years, usually without knowing that is what it is looking at.
At the end, a proper clean up. Not a broom through the middle of the room, an actual clean up, and hardware back where it came from.
Chapter 03
Choosing colour on a house you have to keep looking at
South Florida light is harsher and bluer than the light in any showroom, and it moves a long way between morning and late afternoon. A colour chosen from a fan deck under fluorescent light in a store regularly turns into something else on a Boca Raton wall. The fix is unglamorous: put it on the actual wall, in a decent sized patch, and look at it at more than one time of day before committing.
We work with Benjamin Moore, Sherwin-Williams and Centura Paints, and which one goes on your house depends on the substrate and the exposure rather than on a preference. A south facing stucco elevation and an interior hallway are two different problems and should not receive the same coating. One of our customers in Delray Beach wrote that the owner helped her choose the colours, and that is genuinely part of the job, not an upsell.
Work usually starts two weeks after a proposal is accepted. Office hours are Mon-Fri 7:30am-4pm, and an appointment is required, which is deliberate: it means the person who comes out is somebody who runs the jobs.
Creative Images Painting, Boca Raton. Licensed and insured. Florida license # U-17482. Call (954) 857-3213.