Painting in Sacramento, CA

Sacramento is the state capital and by a wide margin the largest city on this list: 524,943 people across 98.61 square miles at the 2020 census. It is also the most varied, and that variety is the thing that actually matters when quoting a job here. The central neighborhoods carry genuinely old housing — Craftsman, Tudor and Colonial Revival homes with wood siding, deep eaves, decorative trim and double-hung windows — while the outer suburbs are stucco tract housing from the 1970s onward.

Those two housing types need almost opposite approaches. An older wood-sided home is a preparation job: scraping, sanding, filling, caulking the joints where trim meets siding, and priming bare wood before anything else happens. Detailed trim takes brushwork, not a sprayer, and the time goes into cut lines rather than coverage. A stucco house is a different exercise — the surface is porous and the failures show up as hairline cracking and chalking rather than peeling, so it wants washing, crack treatment and a coating chosen for masonry.

The other Sacramento-specific thing is the sun. The city sits at 26 feet in the middle of the valley floor, and a south or west-facing wall here takes a genuinely punishing amount of summer UV. That is what fades a color and what breaks a film down early, and it is why the exposure of each elevation is worth talking about before a color is chosen rather than after.