About Cardsofchange

Painters Who Read the Governing Documents

Cardsofchange is a painting contractor working across Santa Monica from a shop on Olympic Blvd in the 90404 ZIP. We do the ordinary work, interiors, trim, doors, whole building exteriors, and we do one thing that most crews treat as somebody else’s problem. When a repaint has to be approved by an owner association or an architectural committee, we prepare the package that goes to them.

That came out of losing time, not out of a business plan. A few years ago we had three condominium jobs stall in the same spring, all of them at the same point. The owner had a signed estimate and a start date, and then a management company wrote back asking for product data sheets, marked elevations and a scope with exclusions. Nobody had told the owner any of that would be needed. Each job slid a full meeting cycle, which around here means four to six weeks, and one of them slid two.

What Changed

We started assembling the submittal before the estimate rather than after it. Walk the building, note which surfaces are common area and which belong to the unit, brush large drawdowns onto the wall itself where the light will actually hit them, photograph them in fog and again in afternoon glare, and write the scope so a reviewer can see exactly where the work stops. It adds an afternoon. It has saved jobs a month.

The Building Stock Here

Santa Monica is mostly stucco, and a great deal of it went up between the 1920s and the 1970s. Spanish Colonial Revival houses with troweled finishes, small courtyard apartment buildings, and a long run of postwar blocks that were converted to condominiums later. Hairline map cracking in older stucco is normal and it is not automatically a structural problem, but it does decide the coating. Elastomeric will bridge those cracks and it will also seal moisture inside a wall that has no other way to dry, so it is a decision to make on the building rather than a product to default to.

The ocean sets the working day. Salt air, marine layer that can sit until noon, and a dew point close enough to the surface temperature that a coat put on too late in the afternoon will still be soft when the damp comes back. We work the sunlit elevations first and we stop earlier than inland crews do. On a pre-1978 building we follow lead safe practice on any surface we disturb, which affects containment, the daily clean up and how long the elevation is out of use.

Working in an Occupied Building

Most of what we paint has people living in it. Narrow lots, permit parking on both sides and a single loading zone mean staging has to be planned rather than improvised. We give residents written notice of which elevation is coming and when, keep at least one entrance clear at all times, and clean up at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job.

Talk to Us Early

The cheapest conversation is the one before you have picked a color. Call (424) 561-9870 or come by 9303 Olympic Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90404. If all you want is a straight answer on whether your building needs approval and how long it takes, ask for that. We will not charge you for it.