HOA and Condo Repaints, Long Beach
Association repaints run on two clocks: the approval clock and the weather clock. We work to the color schedule the board actually adopted, post notices before we touch a building, and keep a record so the touch-up in year four still matches.
How approvals, color schedules and coastal weather actually play out on a shared building.
The repaints that go badly on shared buildings almost never go badly because of the painting. They go badly because four or five decisions that should have been made in a meeting got made on a ladder instead, by whoever was standing there at the time.
This is the list of those decisions, in the order they come up, written from the contractor side of the table. Some of them your management company will already have handled. Some of them nobody has looked at since the buildings went up.
Ask for the color schedule and see what comes back. There are three common answers.
The good answer is a document listing every painted element on the property with a product line, a sheen, a base and a colorant formula. If you have that, you are ahead of most associations in this city and the rest of this article gets easier.
The middle answer is a set of names without formulas. Manufacturer color names get retired, reformulated and renamed, and a name from a decade ago may not resolve to anything on a current fan deck. It is recoverable. A clean chip cut from a protected spot, behind a downspout or under a rail mount, can be read and matched far more accurately than the sun beaten field of the wall.
The bad answer is a chip stapled to an old invoice and a board member who remembers it being called something with the word sand in it. That is not a crisis either, but it means the color selection is happening again from scratch, and that takes weeks rather than days because it needs review and a vote.
Whichever answer you have, the deliverable at the end of the repaint should be the good version. Insist on it in the contract. It is the cheapest thing on the entire project and it is what makes the next touch-up a phone call.
This is the one that turns into a dispute, and it turns into a dispute after the money has been spent.
On a typical Long Beach condominium the exterior stucco is common area. Beyond that it varies genuinely, not as a technicality. A balcony rail may be common area while the balcony floor is a limited common element assigned to the unit. A front door is often the owner’s, a garage door is often not, and a patio fence between two ground floor units can be either depending on how the original plan drew it.
Read the CC&Rs and the recorded plan before scope is finalized, not after. Then have the contractor mark an element map: a plan of the property with each painted element color coded by who is responsible. Attach it to the proposal. If an owner has already painted their door a color that is not on the schedule, that gets flagged on the map too, and the board decides in advance whether it is repainted to schedule, left alone, or handled as an enforcement matter separate from the paint contract.
Doing this at proposal stage costs an afternoon. Doing it after the invoice costs a special meeting and sometimes an attorney.
Where two units meet on one continuous plane, the wall is one surface visually and two responsibilities on paper. Nobody can see the join in the finished work, which is exactly why it needs to be measured before the work.
We map those runs and put the linear footage in the proposal. If the association is paying for all of it, fine, say so. If a portion is being billed to an individual owner, that owner should know the number before the sprayer arrives, not from a statement six weeks later.
The same logic applies to any building where a commercial tenant occupies a ground floor unit. Their storefront elevation is frequently outside the association’s scope and inside the visual result. Settle it early or the building comes out looking half finished.
Long Beach has a coating season and it is not the whole year, which surprises boards that assume Southern California means paint whenever you like.
The marine layer sits over the city on most mornings for a good part of the year, and stucco holds that overnight damp long after the fog has burned off and the wall feels dry to the hand. Coating over a damp substrate is how you get blistering and adhesion failure on a job that looked perfect the week it finished. A competent crew checks surface temperature and dew point rather than looking at the sky, which in practice means first coat goes on later in the morning than anyone would like.
The other end of the day matters just as much. Surface temperature falls back toward the dew point in the late afternoon, and a coat that has not formed a film before it gets wet again will not cure the way it should. That is why an association repaint in this city runs on a shorter working day than the same job would inland, and why a schedule promising the whole complex in three weeks in February should be questioned.
Sequence around exposure. Start on the shaded elevations in the morning while the sun deals with the others, and follow the sun around the building rather than working street by street.
Plenty of associations phase a repaint across budget years, one or two buildings at a time. That is a legitimate financial decision and we quote it without argument. It has one consequence that boards should hear before they vote.
Paint fades on exposure. A building painted this year and a building painted in four years will not match, even ordered from the same formula, and the gap will be most visible on the elevations that take afternoon sun. The buildings painted first will have lost some depth by the time the last ones go on.
If you phase, phase by exposure rather than by street order or by which building complained loudest. Group the elevations that get similar sun so that the difference falls along a natural break in the property rather than between two buildings that face each other across a courtyard.
And order the tint for each phase against a retained sample from the previous one rather than against the original chip.
On a coastal complex the rail, gate and stair steel will fail before the stucco does, and it is often scoped as an afterthought.
Salt attacks galvanized rail and iron from the weld seams and the anchor points outward, and the damage is usually worse on the underside of the top rail where nobody inspects. Painting over active rust with a house paint buys a season and leaves the corrosion working underneath.
The right scope is wire brushing or grinding back to sound metal, spot priming with a rust inhibitive primer, and finishing with a direct to metal coating rated for exterior exposure. It costs more per linear foot than the wall behind it and it should be a separate line on the proposal so the board can see what it is paying for.
Work backwards from the start date.
Paint for a full complex is tinted in quantity, ideally in a single batch so the last building matches the first, and that order takes lead time. Before the order there has to be an adopted schedule. Before the adoption there has to be a meeting with the item on the agenda. Before the meeting there should be a mockup on a real wall that the committee has seen in both morning and afternoon light, and a mockup wants a week or two up before people trust their reaction to it.
Add it up and you want the color settled four to six weeks ahead of mobilization. Associations that approve a color the week before the start date are the ones that end up with two shades of the same beige and a very long thread of emails about it.
A repaint is not always the right spend. If the chalking is light, the caulk joints at the trim are still flexible, and the metal is clean at the anchors, the buildings may have two more years in them and the money may be better aimed at a parapet cap, an irrigation head that has been soaking a wall every night, or a flashing detail that will otherwise destroy the new paint from behind.
Any contractor who walks your property and cannot name a single thing you should not spend money on this year is not really looking at your buildings.
Call (562) 527-4101 and we will walk the elevations with the board.
The scope on a shared building is wider than most owners expect, and the ambiguity is usually at the edges. Here is what we handle and where the boundaries sit.
Wash, cut out and patch the cracks that matter, prime bare and patched stucco with a masonry primer, then two coats of the adopted body color. On the older tract stucco east of Redondo we check whether an elastomeric coating already sits on the wall, because putting a breathable acrylic over one behaves differently than starting from bare.
The fascia boards and eaves take the worst of the sun on south and west runs and are the first thing to chalk out on a complex that has gone a year or two past due. Loose material comes off, bare wood gets a bonding or stain blocking primer depending on what is bleeding, then two coats.
Salt air rusts galvanized rail and wrought iron from the underside and the weld seams outward. We wire brush and spot prime the rust back to sound metal, then use a direct to metal coating rather than a house paint that will lift in a season. Stair stringers and handrails on exterior walkways get the same treatment.
Front doors and garage doors are usually the elements the color schedule treats separately, and often the ones an owner has already changed without asking. We reconcile what is on site against what the schedule says and take the board's direction in writing before we repaint an owner's variation.
Where two units meet on one plane, the join is invisible in the finished wall and very visible in the invoice. We map those runs before quoting so the association knows exactly which linear footage sits on common area and which is being billed to an individual owner.
Every element we paint is recorded: location, product, sheen, base, colorant formula and date. That record is the reason a rail replaced in three years can be matched, and the reason the next contractor does not have to guess.
Association work is priced per building, not per unit, because a twelve unit building with one elevation exposed to the harbor costs differently than twelve units in a row with a shared wall between each. The ranges below are what we typically see in Long Beach for a two story building with an ordinary stucco body, and they assume the color schedule is already adopted. A firm number goes in writing after we walk every elevation with the board.
Sprigtoys paints the outside of shared buildings in Long Beach: condominium complexes, townhome rows, two-story duplexes, and the small associations that own six units and one long stucco wall between them. The painting itself is ordinary trade work. What makes these jobs different is that nobody on site owns the whole wall, and the color was decided in a meeting before we were hired.
That changes the order of operations. On a single family house we walk the property, quote it, and start. On an association we start with the governing documents and the adopted color schedule, then confirm which surfaces are common area, which are limited common elements assigned to a single owner, and which are the owner's own problem. A balcony rail, a front door, a patio fence and a garage door can each fall in a different bucket in the same complex, and painting the wrong one is not a paint mistake, it is a billing dispute.
Then the weather. Long Beach mornings sit under a marine layer that keeps stucco damp well past sunrise, and salt coming off the harbor and the breakwater eats galvanized rail and iron gate work faster than anything inland. South and west elevations fade first and hardest. A repaint scheduled sensibly starts on the shaded side while the sun burns the damp off the other, and it stops in the afternoon before the surface temperature drops back through the dew point. We plan the sequence around that, building by building, and we tell the board what it means for their timeline before we sign anything.
Most of our work sits between the water and the older streets inland, with a run of post-war tract associations further east. The building stock changes fast across a few miles here and so does the prep.
Around Alamitos Beach and Bluff Park it is mostly two and three story walk-ups from the 1920s and 1930s with iron rail and stucco over wood frame. Belmont Heights and Rose Park run to bungalow courts and small duplex associations. Bixby Knolls and the streets east of it are post-war stucco, wider buildings, alley-access garages, and a fair number of mid-century flat-roof units where the parapet cap is the thing that actually leaks. Call (562) 527-4101 and tell us the era and the unit count.
We will walk every elevation with the board or the manager, photograph the failures, mark which elements sit on common area and which do not, and come back with a scope and a color schedule the committee can actually vote on. If the honest answer is that your complex has two more good years left in it, we will say that too and you can put the money somewhere it is needed now.
Call (562) 527-4101