About Footyforfood

The Crew People Call When the Old Color Will Not Go Away

Footyforfood paints houses in Long Beach. We work out of Bellflower Blvd in the 90802 ZIP, and a good share of our calendar is one specific job: burying a color somebody has grown tired of under a much lighter one.

That sounds like a small niche until you have tried it. A homeowner picks a soft white, buys two gallons of a paint that says it covers in one coat, spends a Saturday rolling it over a navy dining room, and ends up with a wall that looks even and clean while it is wet and looks like a cloudy gray ghost by Sunday morning. Then they call somebody. Often they call us, and the first thing we do is tell them what the wall was always going to need.

Why We Talk About Coats Instead of Colors

The color you pick is the fun part and it takes ten minutes. The number of coats it will take to get there is the part that sets the price, sets the schedule and decides whether you are happy with the result in two years. So we lead with it.

Paint hides by building an opaque film. Manufacturers publish spread rates near 350 to 400 square feet per gallon at the film thickness they tested, and that assumes you are going over something close to the same value. Push the value gap wide enough and you are asking one or two coats to do the work of three. A tinted primer under the finish usually solves it for less money, because primer costs less per gallon than a premium finish and blocks harder. Sometimes the answer is a stain-blocking primer because the old pigment will bleed rather than simply show. We would rather explain that on the walkthrough than argue about it in week two.

What We Actually Do on a Job

We walk the rooms with a work light held flat to the wall, because light colors reveal every dent and roller lap the dark color was hiding, and those are cheap to fix before painting and expensive to fix after. On a real color change we brush a test patch of the coating we intend to use and let it dry, since dry film hides differently than wet film. Then the scope goes in writing with the primer named, the sheen named and the coats counted per room. If we get the count wrong, absorbing the extra pass is ours, not yours.

Working on Long Beach Houses

The older stock around Belmont Heights, Rose Park and Bixby Knolls is largely 1920s and 1930s bungalows with lath and plaster walls and paint layers that predate 1978, so lead-safe practice is normal work for us rather than an exception. Further east the post-war stucco tracts and the mid-century flat-roof homes bring a different problem, which is chalking on the south and west elevations from years of strong afternoon sun. A light color goes onto chalk beautifully and fails within two seasons, so those walls get washed and tested before anything is opened.

Salt air off the harbor and the morning marine layer shape the exterior schedule too. We start later and stop earlier than an inland crew because coating stucco that is still below the dew point traps moisture under the film.

Call (562) 670-1070 or find us at 301 Bellflower Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90802.