Photo Gallery

Every painting company has a gallery, and every gallery looks good. That is the problem with galleries. Below is ours — sixteen years of residential and commercial work across San Diego County — along with something more useful: what our founder actually tells homeowners to look for in a painter's photos, and the three things a photo can never prove no matter how good it looks.

Justin Brown, our founder and lead estimator, has spent sixteen years walking San Diego homes and writing estimates, and a fair number of those visits are to fix work someone else photographed proudly. Here is what he looks at when he sees another company's portfolio — apply it to ours as hard as you like.

• Look for before shots, not just after shots. An after photo tells you a house is now a color. A before-and-after pair tells you what condition the house was in when the crew arrived and what they actually fixed. The chipping and peeling paint, the bubbling stucco at the base of a wall, the rotten fascia — that is the work. The color is the easy part.
• Look at where two colors meet. On an interior, that is the line where the wall color stops and the ceiling color starts, and every accent wall in the house. Cutting a clean line so one color does not bleed into the other is slow, skilled work, and it is the first thing that gets rushed when a crew is behind schedule.
• On cabinets, look at the hinges. Painting around hinges instead of taking the doors off saves hours, and it leaves brush marks around every hinge for the life of the finish. In our cabinet photos the doors came off, the hardware came off, and every piece was labeled so it went back exactly where it started.
• On stucco, look for the patch you cannot find. A crack filled properly gets opened up wider first, packed with new stucco, then floated out and textured to match what is around it. Done right, you cannot see where it happened. Done quickly, you get a smooth gray smear across a textured wall, and it will be the first thing your eye lands on for the next decade.
• On wood, look at the repairs. Where only part of a fascia board is rotten, the right fix is often a splice — cut out the bad section, fasten in new wood, leave the sound eighty percent alone. That is a judgment call made board by board, and it shows up in photos as a house with no obvious repair scars.

Our work is split by the kind of job it is, because the things worth judging are different in each one.

• Before and after — the pairs, side by side. Start here if you only look at one gallery.
• Exterior painting — stucco bodies, fascia and eaves, garage doors, front doors, trim, and the prep underneath all of it.
• Interior painting — walls, ceilings, doors and jambs, baseboards, and the cut lines between them.
• Cabinet painting — doors off, degreased, primed and sprayed. Look at the hinges.
• Staining projects — where a homeowner wanted the wood grain kept rather than covered.
• Drywall repair — the patches you are not supposed to notice once the wall is painted.
• Fences and decks — the surfaces that take the most weather and the most maintenance.
• Commercial projects — our commercial interior and exterior work, run as a separate side of the business.

We would rather point this out than have you find it out later. A gallery is evidence of what a company's finished work looks like on its best day. It is not evidence that the company is insured, that it showed up when it said it would, or that the finish is still holding two years on. Those need checking separately, and all three are easy to check.

• The license, bond and insurance. Type "contractor license lookup" into Google, or go straight to the Contractors State License Board license check. It will tell you whether a company is licensed, whether that license is currently active, and whether its workers' compensation, general liability and bond are active — licenses do get suspended. Ours is license #1131421. Look it up before you look at another photo.
• Addresses you can drive past. Ask any painter for a list of recent jobs near you that you can walk or drive by. A finished house on a street near yours, in daylight, two years after the crew left, tells you more than any photograph will. Ask us and we will send you a list.
• References you can actually call. Not a testimonial page — a phone number or an email address of a real customer who will answer. Ask us for those too, and while you are at it read our customer reviews and check how recent they are. A company can have been good five years ago and lost its way since, with new crews or new management. Recency matters more than volume.

If you want to put faces to the work, the team photos and project videos on this page show the painters who would be in your house. That matters more than it sounds: on a five-day interior job you are living alongside three painters, and whether they are friendly, tidy and easy to talk to is not a small detail of the experience — for most homeowners it is the experience.

Photos get you to a shortlist. The estimate is where you find out what you are actually buying — whether it lists the grade of paint or only the brand, whether it says how many coats, whether the prep work is broken out line by line or hidden behind the words "paint house". We wrote up exactly what a professional painting estimate should contain, and what it means when one of those pieces is missing, on our why choose us page.

Seen enough? Ask us for a free estimate, or call or text 619-356-0830 — day or night. We will walk your property, itemize the work so you can see what each part costs, and tell you honestly if something does not need doing yet.