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>>Narrator: I live in Phoenix, Arizona. It's a hot and dry place, and then there's the
monsoons. It's a killer environment for house paint. My house needed painting and I needed
someone who could get it done and get it done right.
A friend of mine recommended Bob Fisher of RLF Painting, and I made the call. This is
what I started with. This is what I ended up with. I'll let Bob tell you more about
the process.
>>Bob Fisher: As I looked at the overall condition of what the house, what kind of condition
it's in, and I looked for the condition of the existing coatings, whether they're delaminating,
they're chalking, all the things that can go bad with coatings. I look at that aspect
of the job. Then I look at the condition of all the substrates, whether it be the stucco
if there's an excessive amount of cracking, if they had wood damage, garage door damage,
any kind of damage, I bring it to their attention, and then I give them options on what can be
done. The biggest thing generally is the landscaping.
We require them to trim back any trees, bushes, vegetation, anything that's up against the
house because in the long run, if you get all those things away from the home, you can
give them a better quality product. We come and we remove all the screens, and we do our
washing, and we clean the windows after that. Them walls take a very big beating, and that's
generally where you'll see a lot of paint that's peeling and checking, and we take a
little special attention. We pull back all the rocks. Any landscaping that's there, we
pull all that back, and then we dig the stem wall down as far as possible. In that way,
we can then scrape the stem. We can patch it and prime the stem. We do all those things
so that it can be well exposed, well prepped, and then the painting or the coating that
goes on there can be good, solid coating to where it will hold up.
We'll prime and fill in all that checking and make it so that it becomes a solid surface.
Then what that'll do is it will extend the life of the paint because you're not allowing
the moisture in the element to get in there, to get behind the product, the paint and then
break it down. Any time that we have horizontal surfaces,
we like to encapsulate that. That's part of the general preparation that we always do.
We use an Elastomeric product. The purpose of that is, is to get the surface to where
it's called pinhole-free or where you have a nice, solid surface to coat over. What that
again will do is it'll help impede any of that moisture. That's what we try to do with
a lot of the techniques. In the things that we do in a simple paint job is come up with
ways and ideas that can be very cost effective and used in exterior repaint, per say, and
it goes a long way in having that paint job last a lot longer by just doing some small
little things at the beginning in the preparation stage.
A lot of garage doors they are such a large surface, and again, they take a lot of exposure,
so there's nothing really protecting them. They're wide open to the element. They get
pretty beat up also. A good washing if need be, spot priming, where have it, a lot of
the bucks on the doors. Those will peel. A lot of the homes when they're originally done,
they don't prime those things so the paint doesn't well adhere to them over a long period
of time. We’ll spot prime them, make them back to
new condition prior to painting. Once you've painted it, you get a good sound surface,
and then it should hold up for quite a long time.
When you paint stucco, there's a lot of misconceptions on how to do it correctly. Sometimes it requires
a spray and a back roll. Sometimes you can just do what you call a two coat cross by
spraying stucco up and down and sideways. What that does it gets all the angles of the
stucco so that you get a better coverage, and you get better in more mill thickness.
There's still some people that say that rolling is better. Well, in my opinion, it is in certain
instances, but in a lot of instances by spraying it correctly, you can put a lot of paint on
there by the correct tip sizes, how the pass is done. There's a lot of things involved
in it to where you can get a very good quality surface coverage.
A lot of the products today even have technology built into them where some of it has what
they call crawl technology where in the instances of a Spanish lace stucco it goes behind it
and it gets in the areas where by spraying it, it gets a full coverage. That's what you're
trying to do is get a good coverage on your stucco so that you get a longevity out of
it. That's the whole thing is you don't want to have to be painting your house every three
years or four years or every five years. By using the higher great quality products, the
correct techniques, and a good applicator, you can get a lot longer out of the life of
your coating than the average Joe will get.
>>Narrator: The house looks amazing. The process was real easy. The RLF Painting team did things
I would never have thought of, much less done myself.
The prep was done in just a single day, and all the cracks and other damages were fixed,
and by the next day, the whole house was painted. They caulked around windows, filled in cracks
in the fascia board, covered plants with drop cloths, covered the driveway and walks with
plastic, and they not only took off all the screens, but they even power washed them,
and put them back on. RLF Painting also does interior painting and
has many other specialty services which I'll be using in the future. You need to make the
call, just like I did, and set up an appointment with Bob.
Bob and his team are not just professional painters, they are amazing craftsmen. If you
want to make your house look better, you need to plant one of these in your front yard.
By the way, this is a true story. This is my house, and months later, I am still getting
compliments from my neighbors as to how great my house looks.