Storefronts, office and industrial exteriors, churches, multi-unit residential and the metalwork that comes with all of them. Commercial exteriors are bought on service life rather than on colour: the question is not what it costs to paint, but how many years before it has to be painted again.
Substrate first
Masonry and block. Brick, block and stucco hold and release moisture, and a film-forming paint that seals the face traps water inside the wall — which then freezes, spalls the brick and takes the coating off in sheets. These walls want a breathable masonry coating, and a block wall wants a block filler before anything else or it drinks topcoat and still looks porous.
Metal. Railings, handrails, bollards, canopies, doors and frames. The life of a coating on metal is decided entirely by how the rust was dealt with: painted over, it keeps going underneath and lifts the new coating within a season. Loose rust and scale come off, bare metal gets a rust-inhibitive primer, and only then does the finish go on.
EIFS and stucco. Sound panels can be coated; failing or water-damaged ones are a repair first, and coating over them hides a problem rather than fixing it.
Wood fascia, soffit and trim, on the same principles as a house exterior but usually at height and usually over an entrance that has to stay open.
Working over a live site
An occupied commercial exterior means customers, staff and vehicles moving under the work. Access equipment gets set where it does not block an entrance or a fire exit, work over doorways happens outside trading hours, and overspray control is planned around the parking that cannot be closed. Where a lift or scaffold is needed we say so at estimate stage rather than adding it later.
Weather windows
Exterior coatings have real application limits — surface temperature, humidity and dew point — and our summers and autumns both push against them. We will not coat a hot south elevation in the middle of a July afternoon or apply a finish into a falling autumn dew point, because both produce a film that looks fine on handover and fails early.
That occasionally costs a day. It is cheaper than a repaint.
What you get before you commit
A written scope covering surfaces, preparation, products, access and schedule, in a formal agreement, from a company based in Greensboro that will still be here when the warranty question comes up.