About Inmanstories

We Started With One Stuck Window

Inmanstories paints the wood on older Pasadena houses. We are based off Lake Ave in the 91107 ZIP, and the work that keeps us busy is the part most painting crews quote around: double hung sash, glazing putty, casings, jambs, sills, front doors and the eave trim on a Craftsman overhang.

The narrower focus was not a marketing decision. It came out of a job on a 1910s bungalow where the owner wanted the exterior repainted and we opened up the first window to find the bottom rail soft enough to take a screwdriver by hand. Painting that house as quoted would have looked excellent for a year and then failed at exactly the same six places. We went back with a different number and a different scope, and the windows have held up since.

What That Means in Practice

We take sashes out where the stops and the parting bead let us, and we work them on a bench. Old putty gets cut back to sound material rather than skimmed over. Bare rabbets get primed before new compound goes in, because dry timber pulls the oil out of the bed and that is what makes a putty line crack two summers early. Soft wood gets consolidated and rebuilt where rebuilding will hold, and where it will not we say so and price a new section instead of hiding it under filler.

Almost every house we work on predates 1978, so lead-safe practice is the default rather than an upgrade. Wet methods, contained work areas, no dry scraping into open air, sheets folded inward and taken away. It slows the job and it is not negotiable on wood of that age.

The Local Part

Pasadena weather is easy on paint schedules and hard on paint film. Long dry stretches mean we can plan exterior work with some confidence, but the same sun that lets us work chalks a south facing coating years before the north side shows anything, and the Santa Ana winds coming off the San Gabriels drive grit into a freshly opened surface if you have left it standing. So we prime the day we open something up rather than leaving bare timber out over a weekend.

The housing stock does the rest. Bungalow Heaven and the streets around it are full of Greene and Greene influenced woodwork, deep overhangs, exposed rafter tails, shingle and board siding, and plaster walls rather than drywall inside. Spanish Revival stucco elsewhere in town has less wood on the elevation but concentrates it all in the trim and the doors, where it is the first thing anyone looks at.

We work a few openings at a time in occupied houses, we clean up daily, and we would rather do one window well as a sample than talk you into a whole house on a phone call. Call (626) 427-2021 and describe the worst one.