House Painting in Orange County with Painting Contractor John Thomas of Thomas & Associates Painting Services

I’ve done a bunch of different speeches. The last few, you get the screen up there. We’re running pictures, and it may or may not work, and so I did something different this time. I’ve gone to the hand out speech. I have some handouts, and we’ll talk about a few things when it comes to painting. Let’s see if I can get organized here.

What color is that spill right there?

I don’t know what color that spill is. I like to move around. I’m a move around kind of guy.

Why are there so many whites? Why are they not in color?

When we get to the questions part, we’ll address that. Anyway, during this last four years, during the recession, we had a cash cow. That was following around contractors who were remodeling homes. That cash cow kind of died so we’ve had to kind of reinvent ourselves, and one of the avenues is. One of our members, Ken with BC Flooring does a lot of work for hospitals. We’ve been doing a lot of work in the hospitals Saint Mary’s in Long Beach. We painted labor and delivery.

We painted labor and delivery, and we’ve had to kind of get behind this whole safety program. At one site we had a soffit on the exterior of the place that looked like Swiss cheese, we had to tear that all out. We don’t like doing a lot of wood repair, but, Ken’s been encouraging me to just go and take that kind of stuff on.

So we tore all this stuff out and we rebuilt it, and we painted it all up and it came out really, really cool. Mark Holmes had the exterior of his house and then he asked me if I could do some other repairs and he pointed out some wood work and some window trims. We could do those okay, but, then he had this really neat looking garden bay window thing right there at the kitchen. He said that it leaked every time for about how long?

Two years.

Two years, and it had some flimsy tape up there and everything. Anyway, I asked the guys if they could do that and they said, sure Mr. John, we could do that. So I get over there and they’ve got like this whole giant window off, and set over here and then there it is. Mrs. Holmes’ kitchen, just God and country and clouds over here. Anyway. Long story short, what happened at the end of that repair with these last few rains?

It doesn’t leak anymore.

Is that cool? That’s really cool. So anyway, we’ve taken on some different things so you might want to think about that. You can go ahead and tip us and be confident that we’re going to get the job done correctly. I remember when that rain came, I was like, I sure hope that window doesn’t leak.

That’s really important, because with that bay window, when the water comes down it’s just like a waterfall. I mean if there’s any leak at all, it comes right through. They did a great job. 

So you know that we’ve worked with Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner, we’ve worked with contractors, we work with facility managers, but what’s new in painting is that they’ve come out with this home on the first page of your handout, is this recycling program that you can go ahead and take your paint that you haven’t used, and I know that everybody has probably 12 gallons in their garage or underneath the sink or in the laundry room. Those are the three places that we [hear]. I don’t think we have any paint of the same color. Let’s go take a look in the garage, the laundry room…

You can take your paint now, and go down to Vista, or Dunn Edwards, and turn it in and they will get it recycled, and it’s pretty cool. The down side is that we’re all paying for it, for less than a gallon a [quart] is $0.35, $0.75 for a gallon, and 1 buck 60 for 5 gallons, for up to 5 gallons that’s not bad.

It’s kind of neat that we kind of come together instead of having it mandated from the federal level. Another thing that is kind of neat is are these little samples. I don’t know, I think my showboat, I talked about the samples, and here, take a pen.

When you’re thinking about getting a color for your project, it’s always better to go ahead instead of taking it, unless you’re really trained and really good at it. Like these interior designers can do, or color analyst, is to get some of the color that you want, and now you don’t have to buy a quart. So this is like 5 bucks and you can go ahead and put it up and take a look at it, because it always looks a little different then it’s shipped to me.

There are some people that can look at the chip, and they know, and they’re really confident about it, but, 90% of us know, me included. We’re applicators, we do, we can prep, we can get it ready, but, when it comes to the right coloring, I look at those chips and say what do you think. I think we should get samples, and get three.

When you get three of them, then you get a little bit of a learning curve where you saw it, and say, I see what the sample looks like and that’s how it came out. So then when you go back you can take a look at that. I’ve got two minutes.

Onto lead, lead has been in paint up until 1976, and they don’t put lead in paint anymore. They’ve been reducing that point from about 1920 all the way up to, I don’t know, it’s just been less and less and less lead. The bad thing about lead is that for children it affects their mental development and you might have a lower IQ if you’re exposed to large amounts of lead.

One of the sources of lead has been paint, and it’s when you’re sanding it disperses or chips or they eat it or ingest it, but, we have this article here from Mother Jones, and it’s about lead and violent crimes. I just think it was really neat on this second page of that, it says right here the biggest source of lead in the Post War era, turns out it wasn’t paint, it was leaded gasoline.

Wow, is that kind of interesting. I never heard about that, this speaks to how strong the lobby is of the oil companies. I never even thought about that. So there’s lots of lead out there, but they haven’t done that anymore. But now there is a lead safe practices for painting and you have to take a certificate course in it.

If we go to a site and we test it for lead and there’s lead, we have a certificate that allows us to work on the site there. So we are EPA approved lead safe practice painters. So we can go ahead. We’re almost there here, but, I just want to say the last page here. There was a study that paint fumes are an aphrodisiac, so it is Valentines day, and don’t get out a bunch of paint and start painting.

It’s kind of like perfume. You can open up that little sample, wherever it went. You can open up that little sample and just kind of put it, don’t put it in the main bathroom. Put it like in the kitchen, and just kind of let it waft through, and then close it up. This is for guys and gals.

They come home and go, you started the painting, and you’re like. Yeah, I’m just getting around to it. We’ll just have to see how it goes. I appreciate everything [Business Growth Innovators] has done for me over the past untold years, and all the tips I’ve gotten from it. And if you do have any questions, I can take them at this time.

Thank you so much for your time.

Check out examples of house painting in Newport Beach,  Laguna Beach, Long Beach and Fullerton.

John Thomas
Thomas Painting
714-343-6132
www.johnthomaspainting.com
j.thomas59@verizon.net