A board handed me their reserve fund study and asked why the corridor repaint was already three years overdue
A condo board called me in last spring with their reserve fund study open on the table and a corridor that looked a decade old. The study had a repainting line in it. The money was there. The work still hadn’t happened, and nobody on the board could say why. I’ve now seen the same gap in enough buildings to know it isn’t a funding problem — it’s that the painting line in most studies was never written to be executed from. This post is for boards and property managers who have a reserve fund that says one thing and a building that says another.
1. A reserve fund study prices a cycle, not a scope
The engineer who prepares a study is doing something narrower than most boards think. They walk the building, assign each major component an expected service life and a replacement cost, and lay those out on a funding timeline so the corporation stays solvent. That’s the job, and it’s done well.
What that exercise does not produce is a scope of work. “Corridor repainting — 8-year cycle” is a budgeting instrument. It says money should exist by a certain year. It says nothing about what condition the walls will be in when that year arrives, what preparation they’ll need, or whether eight years was ever the right interval for this building’s traffic.
Boards read the line as an instruction and it was only ever an allowance.
What to look at: find the painting lines in your study and check whether any of them describe a condition. If they only carry a year and a number, you have a budget, not a plan.
2. The interval in the study is generic — your building isn’t
Service-life intervals come from tables. They’re reasonable averages across a large population of buildings. Then reality applies a multiplier.
A corridor in a building with two elevators, a lot of rentals and heavy move-in traffic ages faster than the same corridor in a quiet owner-occupied stack — I’ve seen the same finish look tired at five years in one and fine at ten in another. South and west exterior elevations weather materially faster than north ones on the same envelope, so a single “exterior painting” line covering all four sides is averaging away the elevation that will fail first. Stairwells, garbage rooms and loading corridors take abuse no table accounts for.
None of that makes the study wrong. It makes it a starting point that needs a walk-through to become a schedule.
What to look at: pick the busiest common area in your building and the quietest one. If your study gives them the same repaint year, the interval hasn’t been adjusted for how the building is actually used.
3. Deferral is not free, and painting is where that shows up first
Every board defers. It’s usually rational — something more urgent came up. What’s less understood is that a deferred repaint doesn’t cost the same amount later.
Paint is a protective layer as much as a finish. Once the coating on a railing, a balcony soffit or an exterior wood element loses its film integrity, the substrate underneath starts taking weather directly. Two years past due and you’re still buying a repaint. Five years past due and you may be buying carpentry, rust remediation or filler work first — a different trade, a different line item, and one your study very likely didn’t fund because it assumed the paint was maintained.
That’s the mechanism by which a maintenance line quietly becomes a capital repair. I see it most often on exterior wood and on railing systems, where the failure is visible for years before anyone reads it as urgent.
What to look at: walk your exterior wood and railings before you defer anything. If the coating is broken and the material underneath is exposed, deferring the paint is no longer a painting decision.
4. Sequencing is worth more than the cycle year
Two painting projects that share access, mobilization or protection are cheaper together than apart, and they are much less disruptive to residents. A study lists components independently because that’s how the funding model works — it has no view on what should be bundled.
Balcony ceilings and railings sit in the same access envelope. Corridor walls, doors and frames are one mobilization. Exterior elevations that need the same lift are one setup. When those land in different years on the study because their tabled service lives differ by a year or two, the corporation pays to set up twice and asks residents to live through it twice.
What to look at: lay your next six years of painting lines side by side and mark anything that shares access or a mobilization. Those are your bundling candidates, and moving one line a year to meet another is usually a board decision, not an engineering one.
What to do if you’re seeing any of this
If your study has painting lines coming due in the next two or three years, the useful step before the budget meeting is a condition walk — not a quote. I walk the building with the study in hand and tell you which lines are genuinely due, which have a year or two of life left, which have already slipped past paint into repair, and which ought to be bundled. That produces a schedule you can actually approve and put out to bid, and it usually moves at least one line.
I do this for condominium corporations, multifamily portfolios and property managers across Ottawa, Kanata, Nepean, Orleans and the surrounding region. If a reserve fund line is coming up and you’d like a second read on it, call me at 613-325-3011 or email yasir@heims.ca.
— Yasir, HEIMS Construction
HEIMS Construction is a licensed and insured commercial painting and drywall contractor serving Ottawa and Eastern Ontario, working with condominium corporations, property managers and institutional clients across the region.