Exterior paint costs in Port St. Lucie

After a hurricane, the paint usually waits, and the federal lead rule allows for that. EPA's emergency provision lets contractors skip some lead-safe steps, such as warning signs and dust containment, for work that's immediately needed to protect your home and your family's health. Once the part that deals with the emergency is done, everything else falls under the full rule again. So on a Port St. Lucie house built before 1978, the repaint that comes later has to be done by a certified firm working lead-safe.

That covers more houses than you might think in a metro this young. About 58,000 homes here were built before 1980, a little under a quarter of the total.

Most homes came in two big waves: about 59,000 in the 1980s and about 63,000 in the 2000s. A 1980s house is past forty and has been through a lot of summers. A 2000s house is nearing twenty.

Rain shapes the schedule. Fort Pierce's normals show about 19.5 inches in June through August and still about 14.5 in September through November, so the wet stretch runs well into fall. Winter and spring are the drier months for outside work.