Boards That Delay The Community Repaint Pay For It Twice

Deferring an exterior repaint does not save an association money. It moves the bill onto a later board with more surface repair attached, which is one reason the painting companies Marietta GA associations shortlist tend to open with a walkthrough instead of a number. Most new treasurers meet that argument in the reserve study, on a single line carrying a dollar figure and a date that has already gone by. Residents usually notice it before the spreadsheet does.

Deferred Repaints Show Up Building By Building

Paint does not fail evenly across a community. South and west elevations take the ultraviolet load, so those buildings chalk and fade while the shaded row still looks acceptable from the parking lot. In practice the gap runs two or three years wide on a 96-unit townhome association, which is long enough for residents in the worst building to start asking why their siding looks older than the siding across the street. Film thickness works a little like tire tread. A tire at 3/32 still rolls fine right up until the first hard rain, and a thin coating still reads as painted right up until the season it stops shedding water off the trim.

The Reserve Line Item Nobody Reads Closely

A reserve study lists exterior painting as a component with a remaining useful life and a replacement cost beside it, and both of those numbers are estimates somebody produced on a walk-around, sometimes years earlier. Say the study on that 96-unit association shows a $210,000 reserve balance and flags the repaint as past due. That does not mean $210,000 is available for paint. Roofs, private drives, fencing and the pool deck all draw on the same pot, and the repaint competes with every one of them for a share that was calculated before the last two years of material pricing.

A skeptic reads the funded percentage and the assumed cost per unit, not the balance. If the study assumed a scope that no longer matches the buildings, the line is fiction and the board is voting on it anyway. Reserve study and disclosure rules vary from state to state, so what your association is actually required to fund is a question for your management company and your governing documents rather than for a painter. Ask for the study’s assumptions in writing. A bid built on current square footage and current surface condition will diverge from a five-year-old estimate, and that difference is the number worth arguing about at the next meeting.

Coating Costs Did Not Wait For Boards

Boards tend to assume a deferred project still costs what it cost when it was quoted. Maintenance pricing kept moving anyway. A June 2026 breakdown of property maintenance costs put routine rental upkeep at $85 to $125 a month per 1,000 square feet, with a full interior repaint running $1,500 to $3,500 per unit. Breasy was describing rental interiors rather than townhome exteriors, so read those figures as direction of travel and not as your community’s number. They still explain why the painting companies Marietta GA boards called two summers ago will not honor that summer’s price.

Meanwhile the scope grew. Nobody voted for that part.

Questions Boards Should Ask Every Painting Bidder

Three bids that look similar on price are usually describing three different jobs. The questions below sort them faster than a line-item comparison does. A bidder who cannot answer them in front of a board is telling you something useful about how the job would actually run.

• How much of this price is preparation, and what does preparation include here? A good answer names pressure washing, caulking, wood repair and primer separately.
• Which buildings do you paint first, and why that order? A good answer starts with the worst elevations, not the ones closest to the entrance.
• What happens to residents during the work? A good answer covers notice periods, parking, patios and a named project manager who fields calls.
• What does the warranty cover, and for how long? A good answer states a term in years and says plainly whether labor and materials are both included.

Community Wide Color Beats Building By Building Choices

Communities that let each phase pick its own approved shade end up with four versions of beige and no way to touch anything up. One scheme, specified by product and color code across every building, fence and clubhouse wall, is what makes a repair three years from now invisible instead of obvious. It also shortens the architectural review argument, because the palette already exists on paper. Boards that pair the scheme with a scheduled maintenance program stop treating paint as an emergency and start treating it as a cycle, which is the whole point of a reserve component.

Scheduling The Repaint Beats Debating It Again

A dated project with a deposit is a decision. Another motion to revisit the estimate next spring is not, and the buildings keep weathering through the delay either way. Get the scope measured, get the color specified, and put the phases on a calendar that residents can read.