Coatly, exterior painting in Cochrane, Alberta.

Cochrane sits at the mouth of the Bow Valley, right in the chinook belt. A chinook can lift the temperature twenty or thirty degrees in a few hours and drop it again the same night, and every one of those swings is a freeze-thaw cycle working moisture behind the coating. Calgary gets the same weather; Cochrane gets it with the valley wind on top, and that wind carries grit. On a hillside lot in Sunset Ridge or GlenEagles the west wall is being sandblasted a little every windy day.

What that means in practice is that the coating has to stay flexible and the substrate has to be genuinely clean before it goes on. Paint sprayed over chalk holds for one season and then lets go in sheets. So the work is washing the chalk off, scraping anything already lifting, priming bare wood and repairs, re-caulking the joints that have opened, and then two coats of a flexible exterior acrylic. On stucco it means real crack bridging, not a skim of filler that reopens by spring.

Sunset Ridge, Fireside, Riversong, Heartland and Precedence were built mostly between 2013 and 2019, which puts those streets at the seven-to-twelve-year mark. That is not a random number — it is roughly how long a builder-grade exterior finish lasts. On a spec home the trim and fascia are sprayed once at the framing stage, thin, over minimal prep, with whatever product priced well across a hundred houses at a time.

So it fails on a schedule rather than by accident. South and west elevations chalk first, caulk at window and trim junctions opens, and the fascia and garage door go dull a year or two before the walls do. A proper repaint is a different job from what the builder did, and done that way the second cycle outlasts the first by years. That is the whole argument for doing it once, properly, instead of twice.

Glenbow, Bow Ridge, Cochrane Heights and the East End were built long before the current subdivisions and they behave nothing like them. Wood siding and cedar that has weathered grey, real stucco with settlement cracks, trim that has been painted four or five times, and in places an old oil-based coat under everything. Those homes are mostly prep. Washing and coating is the small part of the day.

We look for the specific things that decide whether a repaint holds: soft wood at the bottom of trim boards where water sat, nail heads that have rusted through the finish, caulk that has gone hard and pulled away, and stucco cracks wide enough to need bridging rather than filling. Anything rotted gets replaced or called out in the quote before we paint over it — covering rot is the fastest way to pay for the same job twice.

Working ranges rather than "call for pricing." They assume siding, trim and fascia, materials included, and they exclude the 5% GST that is the only sales tax in Alberta. Prep condition, height and access move these numbers more than floor area does.

Exterior colour is the decision people stall on longest, and a chip in a paint store tells you nothing about how a charcoal reads on a west-facing Cochrane elevation with the foothills light behind it. Photograph the front of the house from the sidewalk, try the colours you are torn between, and let one of them obviously win.

Exterior work here runs from late May to mid-September. Coatings need both daytime and overnight temperatures above roughly 10°C to cure properly, and Cochrane nights stay cool later into spring than Calgary's do. That leaves about four months, and the whole town wants them.

Quotes locked in during March and April get the good dates. If you are already past that, it is still worth asking — weather cancellations move the schedule around all summer. And if the exterior has to wait for next year, winter is the right time for interior work, because that is when a painting crew in Cochrane actually has room.