Kramer's Bar in Dayton, Ohio had the look a lot of older neighborhood bars have. Three or four building campaigns showed on the outside at once: tan brick here, dark brick there, cream panels over some of the windows, and red-brown paint across the side and rear walls. Nothing was falling off. It just did not read as one building. We painted it so it does.
The bar before
Look at the four photographs and you are looking at four different walls. The front mixed two colors of brick with an older cream section. The side had the same brick running into a red-brown painted wall. The rear was all red-brown. The patio side, where the picnic tables are, was cream brick with bare steel bars on the windows. Each wall was fine on its own. Together they made the place look pieced together, because it was.
Why one color
The owner did not want a new look so much as a single one. On a building like this that means paint, and it means painting everything: the good brick, the old painted brick and the red-brown walls all the same color, so the eye stops sorting the building into sections. The trim then does the opposite job. Fascia, gutters and window bars go dark, and against a light wall they draw the outline of the building the way the mixed materials never did.
Painting brick is a decision you make once, because a coated wall stays a painted wall. Here most of the building had already been painted at some point, so that decision had been made long before us. Our job was to make the rest match and to do it in a way that holds.
Prep and primer
Masonry takes paint well when it is clean and primed, and sheds it when it is not. The old painted surfaces had to be sound before anything went over them, and the bare brick needed a coat that would seal the surface and give the color something to grip. Every wall was primed before it saw color. On brick and block that step is what stops the finish from peeling in sheets a few seasons later, and it evens out how the wall drinks the paint, so the color lays down the same over bare brick as over old paint. Sherwin-Williams walks through the same sequence if you want the homeowner version.
Sprayed and rolled
We sprayed and rolled this building. A sprayer lays an even film fast across big flat walls and gets into the texture of brick and mortar joints without leaving roller marks. A roller gives control where control matters: tight to the trim, around the rooftop equipment and the utility lines, and anywhere the wind or a neighbor's car makes overspray a bad idea. Using both is how a job like this gets done cleanly in a working parking lot.
Dark trim and black bars
The security bars on the patio windows had been bare gray steel. Painted black, they stopped looking like a precaution and started looking like a design choice, and they match the fascia and gutters, which we painted dark along the whole roofline. The downspouts went the other way, painted the wall color so they disappear instead of striping the building. Small decisions, but on a one-story building with a lot of roofline they are most of what you see.
The result
Same building, same footprint, same sign. From the parking lot it now reads as one place instead of a history of additions, and the green script sign has a plain background to stand against for the first time. For a bar that lives on people deciding to pull in, that is the whole point of commercial painting in Dayton, Ohio: not a new building, a legible one.
Own a building that looks pieced together?
If your storefront, bar or shop has the same problem, a mix of materials and old paint that never matched, we will walk it with you and tell you what paint can fix and what it cannot. Our commercial page covers the rest of what we do for Dayton businesses, and this storefront replacement is another Dayton business we kept open while we worked.
Book a free estimate or call (937) 888-WORK. Let's Build Something Limitless.
