A property manager showed me her building’s freshly painted exterior trim — a year later the wood was rotting under paint that was peeling off in sheets

Peeling paint and soft, rotting exterior wood are almost never about cheap paint — they are about what happens before the brush touches the board. What I check on fascia,…

A property manager had her building’s exterior steel stairs repainted last year — by spring the rust was bleeding through the new paint again

Repainting exterior steel that lasts comes down to three things almost nobody gets right: removing the rust properly, specifying a real primer-and-topcoat coating system, and coating in the right temperature…

A property manager repainted her lobby twice and still saw every seam — the problem was the drywall finishing level, not the paint

Drywall finishing levels — Level 4 versus Level 5 — explained for property managers: why seams telegraph through fresh paint under critical lighting, where a Level 5 finish is worth…

A condo board picked their corridor colour off a two-inch chip — on the wall it read completely wrong, and the do-over came out of their reserve

How to spec paint colour for a whole building — why a chip lies at full scale, how lighting and LED temperature shift a colour, building a sheen map, and…

A condo board showed me a reserve study with “painting” as a single line — and that one line is how repaints turn into special assessments

Why treating painting as one line in a condo reserve fund study leads to special assessments — and how to separate the systems, get real scopes, and phase the work.…

A property manager showed me rust streaks on a couple of balconies — it was the flaking paint on the ceilings above them that turned into the building’s real repaint

A property manager asked me to quote one peeling building — the same exterior paint failure was on all six

A facilities manager gave me one empty summer to repaint an Ottawa school before the students came back

A case study in repainting an occupied Ottawa school over the summer break — how we scoped the building, sequenced an entire repaint into the empty July and August window,…

A property manager walked me through a condo’s dim corridors and scuffed lobby — then gave me one summer to repaint all of it without moving a single resident out

A case study in repainting a condo's common areas — corridors, lobby and amenity rooms — in one summer with the building fully occupied: scope, sequencing, minimal disruption, and putting…

Jobsite Notes