Austin Painters

Built in the 1950s and 60s on flat, tree-lined lots. Features original wood siding and trim that requires multi-layer scraping, edge-sanding, lead safety compliance, and moisture management under heavy tree canopy.

Thirty to fifty years younger on steep, lake-facing slopes. Built with breathable stucco over frame, limestone, and fiber-cement that require specialized masonry coatings, multi-story staging, and high western UV protection.

A home built in 1958 has been painted somewhere between six and a dozen times, and those coats have not all bonded to each other equally well. What a crew is really doing is deciding which layers stay and which come off, because a new coat over one that has already let go fails on the same schedule as the layer beneath it.

Original siding, fascia and trim here has expanded and contracted through seventy Texas summers. It wants scraping back to sound material, sanding the edges so the transition does not telegraph through, spot-priming every exposed area, and replacing failed boards rather than coating over soft ones.

Homes built before 1978 may contain lead-based paint, and work that disturbs those surfaces carries specific requirements around testing and containment. It belongs in the estimate conversation, not as a discovery mid-scrape.

Heavy shade protects color from UV, which genuinely helps. It also keeps north-facing walls damp longer, which invites mildew, and where oaks overhang, tannin staining. Both get treated and sealed rather than painted over.

Stucco over frame, dressed limestone, manufactured stone and fiber-cement replace the wood and painted brick of the older belt. Stucco and stone are masonry, and masonry has one non-negotiable requirement: the coating must be breathable. Moisture moves through these walls, and a sealed film-forming product traps it. Blistering follows within a couple of seasons.

Cleared hillside lots, little mature canopy, long western sightlines — the views people bought the home for. The same aspect means the west elevation takes direct afternoon sun for hours, and those walls run a full stage of wear ahead of the rest of the house.

A three-story elevation dropping down a slope is a different proposition from a single-story ranch. Access, staging and safety all cost more, and an estimate that does not reflect the terrain has not accounted for the work.

Fine hairline crazing in stucco is normal and bridges under a flexible coating. Wider or stepped cracking can indicate movement, and coating over it solves nothing. A crew that stops to show you a crack before deciding how to treat it is doing the job properly.

They take the most direct weather of anything on a house, and they are why an otherwise sound exterior starts to look tired. On plenty of homes a trim refresh buys several years before the body needs anything.

Deep colors absorb more UV and give up their color sooner, particularly on the west side of a building. Worth knowing before you choose rather than after.

In the ranch belt the questions are archaeological — how many coats are up there, which of them have let go, whether the fascia is still sound under the finish, and whether a pre-1978 build brings lead into the conversation. On a hillside property the questions are material and physical instead: what the stucco or stone will tolerate, what the west elevation has already given up, and how a crew safely reaches a third story on a slope. Same company, same standard, two genuinely different conversations.

Whatever the house turns out to be, you receive the same document before committing a dollar: the prep sequence broken into discrete steps, the products named, the coat count stated, every surface itemized, the exclusions listed, the timeline, and the warranty term that applies to your project. Nathan Wingate founded Ranger after around twenty years around the trades, and that document is the standard he set.

A dedicated painting crew takes the project and stays with it, rather than rotating between sites and handing your house to whoever is free that morning.

A project manager walks the finished job with you. Anything that goes on the punch list gets put right while the crew is still on site — and only then does an invoice appear.