About Benbijnsdorp

We Look at the Wall Before We Talk About Paint

Benbijnsdorp is a house painting outfit in Long Beach that spends most of its time on stucco. We are on Spring St in the 90808 ZIP, out in the eastern half of the city where the post war tract housing is, and we work from the older plaster in Belmont Heights and Rose Park across to the flat roofed mid century houses and the two storey duplexes.

The reason we ended up specialising is that almost every call here starts the same way. Somebody has noticed fine cracks in a wall, usually on the south or west side where the afternoon sun hits, and they want to know whether painting will hide them. The honest answer depends entirely on which kind of crack it is, and that is a five minute look rather than a guess over the phone.

Shrinkage cracking is normal. Cement plaster shrinks as it cures and it keeps moving with temperature for the rest of its life, so a wandering map of hairlines on an eighty year old bungalow is what a healthy wall looks like. A straight crack running off a window corner is different, because that is the frame moving and it will telegraph back through any filler that cannot stretch. A crack with a step in it, or one you can put a coin into, is not a painting question at all and we say so.

The other half of the job is deciding whether a wall should be sealed. Elastomeric coating is genuinely good at bridging hairline cracks and holding them bridged, and it is oversold badly. It is a thick, flexible, waterproof film, which means it also stops the wall drying outward. In a city that gets a marine layer most mornings and salt air off the harbour, a wall with a leak in it under a sealed coating will blister that coating off within a couple of years and the money is gone. So we check flashings, hose bibs, sprinkler throw and the grade at the weep screed before we recommend it, and on a good many houses we recommend a breathable acrylic instead, which costs less.

What that adds up to in practice is a lot of preparation and not much upselling. We wash, we scrape the chalk off, we fill and texture the cracks so the repair does not read as a stripe under low sun, we caulk every joint, we prime bare plaster with something that actually bonds to masonry, and then we put on two full coats. Where the house was built before 1978 we work to lead safe practice on any surface we disturb, which mostly means containment and clean up rather than drama.

We are not the cheapest quote you will get, and on plenty of houses we are not the biggest one either, because we will tell you when a wall has another two or three years in it. Call (562) 950-8749 and we will come and read the cracks.