Old oaks, old houses, and the bay at the end of the street.

A small town under a big canopy

Safety Harbor is a few blocks of Main Street running under old oaks down to the bay, with quiet streets of older homes on either side. Cottages and frame houses from the thirties and forties near downtown, block ranches from the sixties further out, and larger homes along the Bayshore facing Tampa Bay.

The oak canopy is the town's best feature and the north wall's worst enemy. Shaded stucco stays damp, and damp stucco grows mildew. Every exterior here starts with a wash that kills the growth at low pressure, and real drying time before a coat goes on, because a wall under an oak dries slower than one in the open.

The older frame houses want wood prep. Scraping, then priming the bare wood, then caulking every seam and replacing anything soft. On a house from the thirties there is often a hundred years of paint on the trim, and the first job is finding out how much of it is still holding.

• Mildew killed with a cleaner, not blasted off
• Drying time planned around the canopy, not the calendar
• Wood siding and trim scraped and primed, every seam caulked
• Salt rinsed off homes along the Bayshore
• Branches on the wall flagged before we start

The Bayshore, and what the bay does to a house

Along Bayshore Boulevard and the streets running to it, the houses face open water. Tampa Bay is not the Gulf, but salt still carries on the wind, and an east facing wall takes morning sun and afternoon storms straight off the water.

Salt gets rinsed out of the wall before anything goes on, the metal on the house gets looked at before the walls do, and a wall that takes weather off the bay is a candidate for a coating that bridges hairline cracks and keeps wind driven rain out. A sheltered wall does better with a masonry acrylic that breathes. We will say which one your house is.

The larger bayfront homes often have two stories, and the second story is where the weather does its work and nobody looks. Gable ends, trim under the roofline and the upstairs window surrounds get inspected up close, not from the driveway.

Kitchens, cabinets and the inside of an older house

A lot of Safety Harbor kitchens still have their original cabinets, and cabinet painting is on our profile. Doors and drawer fronts come off and get sprayed flat, the boxes get done in place, and a kitchen that looked dated comes back looking new for a fraction of the cost of replacing it.

Inside these older houses the drywall has moved. Cracks over doors, popped nails in a line up the wall, a ceiling stain from a leak that was fixed years ago. All of it gets repaired and textured before paint, by the same people doing the painting.

Chelsea Sang wrote that the final result "exceeded my expectations" and that we "offered the lowest price without sacrificing quality." On an older house, quality is the prep nobody sees.

Getting a price in Safety Harbor

Call (586) 201-9682 or send the form. Tell us if the house is on the Bayshore or under the canopy, because each one changes the wash and the coating. The estimate is free, written, and names the product and the coats.