About Aquaaid-international

A Painting Crew That Works on Old Pasadena Houses

Aquaaid-international paints houses in Pasadena, and the work that shapes how we run a job is the age of the housing stock here. Craftsman bungalows, shingle and horizontal siding, Spanish Revival stucco, deep overhangs with exposed rafter tails, plaster over lath inside instead of drywall. A lot of it went up between the 1900s and the 1940s, and every one of those houses has older paint somewhere in the stack.

Lead was allowed in residential paint until 1978. That single date changes what a repaint should look like on most of the streets we work. It does not mean the house is dangerous and it does not mean everything has to come off. It means the surfaces we plan to disturb should be tested rather than assumed, and that the prep method should follow the result instead of following habit.

How We Approach It

• Test the surfaces we intend to disturb. Window sash, jambs, door edges, porch rails and whichever elevation is failing. Not a blanket guess about the whole building.
• Results in writing, attached to the quote. So the prep you are paying for is tied to something that was measured on your house on a given day.
• Wet methods, contained. Where a result comes back positive, we scrape wet, sheet the ground well past the drip line, run sanders with a sealed vacuum, and bag and remove debris daily rather than at the end.
• Stabilize before stripping. Sound, adhered paint is usually best left in place and coated over. Taking everything back to bare wood creates the dust that careful work exists to avoid.
• Prep, prime, then two coats. Preparation is most of the labor and most of the cost. A color change never covers in one coat, and a one-coat quote comes back as a callback.

Honest About What We Are Not

We are painters. We are not a testing laboratory, and we do not carry any accreditation to sell you as a badge. What we do is straightforward: we use the field testing that is available to a contractor, we tell you exactly what came back and where, and if a result is ambiguous or a house needs a proper assessment by somebody whose whole job that is, we say so and we point you at one. If your job needs work we should not be doing, we would rather lose it than fake our way through it.

The other honest part is timing. Not every house needs painting when the owner thinks it does. In Pasadena the south and west elevations take the whole load of the inland sun and fail years ahead of the shaded sides, so a common recommendation from us is to do those two walls properly this year and leave the rest for the next cycle. That is a smaller invoice and a better result than stretching a budget thin across a whole house.

Get in Touch

Call (626) 566-4947 or find us at 2060 Walnut St, Pasadena, CA 91107. We will come out, look at the house, test what needs testing, and put the prep scope in writing before anybody quotes you a color.