Cabinet painting, interior painting and front door finishing in Bayside.

Bayside sits at the top of the North Shore on generous lots, with a mix of mid-century homes and later contemporary construction. What sets the work apart here is exposure: the closer a house sits to Lake Michigan, the more punishing the conditions on its finish.

Lake-adjacent properties deal with persistent humidity, wind-driven rain, significant temperature swings as lake air moves inland, and airborne moisture that keeps surfaces damp long after the rain stops. Exterior coatings age faster here than they do a few miles inland, and the failure usually starts at the joints rather than in the middle of a board.

Front doors take the worst of it. A door on an exposed elevation near the lake goes through freeze-thaw cycling, UV load and constant humidity change, and the finish gives up years before the same door would elsewhere. Refinishing properly — back to sound material, correct primer, sprayed build coats — is what makes the next cycle last.

Inside, the common job here is cabinet painting in kitchens built in the sixties and seventies and updated once since. Bayside lots are generous, so the kitchens tend to be generous too — long runs of solid timber boxes that were built to a standard nobody pays for now. The boxes are almost always worth keeping. It is the finish that has dated, and on a run that size, replacing cabinetry costs many multiples of painting it.