About Css-imagine

The Crew That Argues About Finish

Css-imagine paints houses in Long Beach. We work out of Long Beach Blvd in the 90813 ZIP and most of our jobs are within a few miles of it, which is long enough in one city to have learned how paint behaves here specifically.

What we are known for is not a color palette. It is the part of the conversation nobody else seems to have with a homeowner, which is what finish the paint should be mixed in. Color is a taste question and we will help with it, but we do not pretend there is a right answer. Sheen is not a taste question. It is a performance question with a correct answer per surface, and getting it wrong is the reason so many repaints look tired long before the paint has actually failed.

Why We Care This Much About It

Almost every callback we have ever inherited from another crew traces back to a finish decision, not a color one. Flat paint in a hallway that then cannot be cleaned. Flat in a bathroom that then goes moldy in the corners. Satin rolled onto a hand-floated plaster wall in a Belmont Heights bungalow, where the afternoon sun through a west window turns eighty years of gentle waves into something the owner now sees every single day. None of those were bad paint and none were bad colors. They were the wrong film in the wrong room.

So we start there. On the walkthrough we ask what each room is for, who uses it, what gets touched, whether the fan in the bathroom actually pulls, and which way the windows face. Then we specify a sheen per surface and we write it on the quote, because a sheen that lives only in somebody’s memory is a sheen that gets guessed at when the paint is ordered.

The Houses Around Here

Long Beach is not one kind of housing stock and it never has been. The 1920s and 1930s bungalows in Belmont Heights, Rose Park and Bixby Knolls are lath and plaster with texture applied by hand, and they nearly always want a lower sheen than the owner was planning on. The post-war stucco tracts further east are flatter and more uniform and can carry more sheen without complaint. The mid-century flat-roof homes have long unbroken wall planes and big glass, which is the least forgiving combination there is. Two-story duplexes and the alley-access garages behind them get salt air and no shade, and those get treated as exterior problems first and color problems second.

How We Work in an Occupied House

We hang sample boards before we buy anything, look at them with you morning and late afternoon, and only then order paint. We put two coats on any color change and any sheen change. We cover floors, we keep the day’s work to rooms you agreed to lose, and we clean up at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job.

Call (562) 462-0925 or come by 3155 Long Beach Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90813 and we will set up a walkthrough.