This was one of the first commercial projects I ever took on, and it tested everything at once. The gym's orange front face — stucco, over twenty feet high — had faded badly, and inside, years of heavy traffic had left the walls beat up: large holes from misused equipment, countless dings, and paint peeling in the busiest areas.
The job demanded working around a business that never really stops. My first attempt at the front face, with a crew of five painting before opening, was cut short by a freak rainstorm. So I regrouped: rented lift equipment to finish the exterior during business hours, working quickly and carefully around members who wandered through coned-off areas — and even parked in them. The drywall repair brought its own challenge: containing dust in a building full of circulating air. I shut down the gym's large fans and did the repair and patch work overnight, after closing, then brought in a painting crew to recoat the big interior walls in a single overnight push, with clean, pristine cut-ins throughout.
The results have held up. Years later, that front face is still a bright, sharp orange — the stucco drank up that paint like nothing else — and the drywall work earned high marks from the gym's management team. It's the kind of project that proved what careful planning, flexibility, and a good crew can do without ever interrupting a client's business.
Before
The Work
Finished
