Downtown and around Locke Street you’ve got hundred-year-old brick and wood-frame homes, most with layers of old paint on the trim and plaster walls that have seen a few repairs already. Up on the Mountain and out in Ancaster, it’s a mix of older bungalows and newer subdivisions with drywall that was never really primed properly the first time. Dundas has its own small-town feel with heritage homes close to the escarpment, and Stoney Creek and Waterdown are still filling in with new construction that needs its first real coat of colour.

The escarpment weather doesn’t help — humidity climbs off the lake, winters are damp, and cheap exterior paint jobs peel faster here than they would twenty minutes away. We factor all of that into how we prep and what we use, so the job still looks right a few winters from now, not just on the day we leave.