Salt Lake City holds a lot of housing that predates 1978, and that year matters more than any color decision you are going to make. Homes built before then may contain…
Salt Lake City holds a lot of housing that predates 1978, and that year matters more than any color decision you are going to make. Homes built before then may contain lead paint, and lead changes what a contractor can legally do to a surface. Sanding, scraping, and heat stripping all put dust into the air, so the work has to be contained, the site controlled, and the debris cleaned up a particular way. None of that becomes optional because a crew is motivated to win your job. If your house is old enough to raise the question, the honest answer from a painter is testing and containment, not a shrug and a start date.
Where this shows up is in the bid. A contractor planning to work lead-safe is pricing containment, protective sheeting, filtered vacuuming, and slower, wetter methods of taking off failing paint. A contractor who has not thought about it is pricing a fast scrape on a windy afternoon. Those two numbers will not look alike, and the cheaper one is cheaper for a reason you would want to know before you signed anything. Raise the year the house was built in the first conversation, here or anywhere in Salt Lake County. A painter who gets specific about how they handle it is telling you something about the rest of their process too.
On any house here, most of what you are paying for happens before a finish coat is ever opened. Washing off dirt and chalk so the coating has something clean to grip. Scraping whatever is already lifting. Sanding the edges so the transition does not telegraph through the new color. Caulking joints that have opened up. Patching, then priming the bare spots, because bare wood, masonry, and previously painted surfaces do not want the same primer. Skip that sequence and the new color still looks perfectly good on the last day of the job. It simply does not stay that way, and you will not find out for a while.
This is also the part that disappears first when a bid gets sharpened. Nobody writes we skipped the washing on a proposal. They write a number. So when you compare quotes, compare the prep language instead of the totals: what gets washed, what gets scraped, what gets primed, and how many coats actually go on. If one estimate describes that in detail and another says paint exterior with a price beside it, you are not looking at two prices for the same job. You are looking at two different jobs that happen to end with the same color on the wall.
Failing paint is evidence, and it is worth reading before anyone hands you a number. Paint peeling away in sheets, curling back to bare substrate, usually means moisture got behind the film or it never adhered well to begin with: a gutter dumping in the wrong place, a failed seal, a coat applied over a dirty surface years ago. A powdery residue that comes off on your palm is chalking, which is age and ultraviolet exposure doing what they do in this climate. Same house, two different problems, two entirely different fixes, and only one of them is really about paint.
The reason to sort that out first is that a fresh coat does not fix water. If moisture is still getting in, the new paint will fail in the same spot, on roughly the same schedule, and you will have paid for the privilege of watching it happen twice. Chalking is more forgiving. Wash it off thoroughly, prime where the surface calls for it, and it will hold a new coat. A contractor who studies the failure before quoting is planning an actual repair. One who quotes from the driveway is planning to cover it up and be gone before it comes back.
Age is the first clue: if it was built before 1978, treat it as possible until testing says otherwise. Testing is how you know for certain, and it belongs before any sanding or scraping starts rather than after. The practical effect is on method, not on whether you can paint. Lead-safe work means containment, wet methods, careful cleanup, and no dry sanding that sends dust across the yard and back into the house.
Almost always because they describe different amounts of prep and a different number of coats, not because one contractor is greedy. Washing, scraping, sanding, caulking, and priming take real days and land in the labor line. Two coats over sound prep cost more than one over none, and behave differently long afterward. Ask each bidder to write down the prep steps and the coat count, then compare those lines rather than the totals.
No. Exterior coatings have temperature and moisture limits, and Utah gives you a working window rather than a year-round season. Cold surfaces, overnight lows, and damp mornings all interfere with how a film forms and cures, which is where premature failure starts. Interior work is far less constrained, so exterior inside the window and interior outside it is usually the sane order. Call 801-823-6018 to talk through scheduling.
Walls, ceilings, trim and doors, plus the patching and caulking that decides whether the finished room reads smooth or shows every old nail pop. Inside the house, sheen matters as much as color, because sheen is what you touch and wash.
Learn more →Your south and west walls are aging faster than the north and east ones, and Utah sun is the reason. Exterior work is washing, scraping, sanding, caulking and priming first, then color, inside the part of the year the weather allows.
Learn more →A different craft from wall painting. Cooking grease has to come off, the existing finish has to be dulled so anything will stick, and the topcoat has to survive fingernails, cleaners and doors that get closed and wiped down all day long.
Learn more →Washing, scraping, sanding, caulking, patching and priming. It is most of the labor in a good paint job, none of what you photograph afterward, and the first line quietly deleted when a bid needs to come in low.
Learn more →Decks, fences, railings, doors, beams and interior woodwork. Stains and clear finishes behave differently from paint, because some soak into the wood and some form a film on top, and those two fail in completely different ways.
Learn more →Get quotes that price the prep, not just the color.
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