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Our crew is a few weeks into repainting a Tudor-style character home in Greater Victoria. Half-timber trim, original stucco, leaded windows, a matching garage at the back. Homes like this have stood for generations, and they change how we work. The paint is the easy part. The house is the thing you can get wrong.
Victoria has more of these homes than almost anywhere in BC. Whole streets in Rockland and James Bay are lined with them. If you own one, this is what goes into painting it properly.
A newer home with fibre-cement or vinyl siding forgives a rushed paint job. A character home doesn't. The stucco was troweled on by hand decades ago, and its texture is part of how the house looks. The half-timber trim is real wood that has been soaking up coastal weather since before most paint chemistry existed. Leaded windows can't take rough masking or a careless pressure wash.
There is also no replacing any of it. If original stucco gets blasted off or old-growth trim gets gouged, matching it today is somewhere between expensive and impossible. So the whole job is planned around keeping what's there.
On the Tudor project, the first thing we did was walk every wall and write down what the house actually needs. Not what the quote assumed. What's there.
That means washing the stucco gently instead of hitting it with high pressure, then reading what shows up: hairline cracks that need flexible filler, patches where earlier repairs used a different mix, staining near the foundation where water has been sitting. On the trim, we probe for soft wood. A section that looks fine from the sidewalk can be punky under decades of paint.
Age changes the safety side too. If a house predates 1960, some of the old paint layers likely contain lead. We test before disturbing them, and where lead turns up we keep the prep wet, contained and cleaned up rather than dry-sanding dust across the garden.
Victoria's climate is part of the reason. Damp winters keep moisture in old walls, shaded north faces grow moss and algae, and anywhere near the water gets salt in the air. Old materials hold all of that longer than modern cladding, so surfaces need to be properly clean and properly dry before anything goes on, and that takes a real stretch of summer weather.
Most of the schedule on a character home is prep. Hand scraping where the old coats have lifted. Sanding transitions smooth so new paint doesn't telegraph every old edge. Spot-priming bare wood the same day it's exposed, because bare fir and cedar start taking on moisture immediately. Hairline cracks in stucco get a filler that flexes; rigid patches just crack again the following winter.
Colour is its own conversation. Tudor homes read wrong when the timber-to-stucco contrast is off, so we sample on the actual walls and look at them in morning and evening light before committing. The client picks the colour. Our job is making sure it behaves on old, hand-finished surfaces the way it did on the sample card.
We wrote more about what our crews do between arriving and opening the first can in our behind-the-scenes look at a Victoria exterior repaint.
Two pieces of advice from twenty-plus years of working on Victoria homes.
First, ask any painter you're considering how they handle old stucco and possible lead paint. If the answer is a pressure washer and a quick scrape, keep looking. The cheap quote on a character home usually means the prep you're not getting.
Second, book ahead of the season. Heritage exteriors need a decent dry window, and the crews who do this work carefully get claimed early. We've been WorkSafeBC registered since 2005, carry full liability insurance, and back this work with the same written 3-year warranty as everything else we paint.
We'll share the finished Tudor transformation once the last coat is on. If your own character home is due, request a free quote or call (250) 385-0478 and tell us what you're seeing on your walls.
