House painting in Cerritos begins with a permit, not a paint can: any exterior painting or staining needs a Paint Color Permit, and colors must come from the official city palette. Most of the houses come from one boom, with 55.1 percent built in the 1970s and another 28.6 percent in the 1960s.
Best Top Painting has painted homes since 1988, and we drive in from Simi Valley to see the house before pricing. You get an itemized written scope, and the final payment waits until we have walked the finished work with you.
From Dairy Valley to a 1970s Boom
Cerritos incorporated in 1956 as Dairy Valley, when more than 400 dairies operated inside its limits. Rising land values and taxes in the early 1960s made farming unprofitable, a 1963 special election approved large-scale housing, and from 1970 to 1972 it was California's fastest-growing city.
The city's design manual describes the housing as 1960s and 1970s residences and asks that changes respect their original style, detailing and scale. It also calls for enhanced materials such as wood, simulated wood, stone or brick on fronts and street-visible sides, so a front elevation may mix several surfaces, each with its own prep.
At the Long Beach Airport station, about six miles away, August highs average 83.2°F and most of the 12 inches of yearly rain falls from December to February. The whole city also lies in a state liquefaction hazard zone, and the 1933 Long Beach earthquake brought strong shaking throughout the area, so we check stucco for cracks on every estimate.
Landmarks, Floodways and Two Decades of Houses
Most local landmarks are civic and commercial. The Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts opened in 1993, Cerritos Towne Center was completed in 1994, and the Civic Center on Bloomfield Avenue holds City Hall and the Sculpture Garden, dedicated in 2006.
Two concrete-lined floodways, the San Gabriel River Channel and Coyote Creek Wash, cross the city, and its built areas are mapped in FEMA Flood Zone C. For painting, the more useful split is age: 1960s houses make up the older third of the stock, the 1970s homes are the majority, and very few buildings survive from before 1933.
House Painting in Cerritos, Permit to Final Coat
Each service below works inside the city's permit and palette rules. Repairs are done only to prepare surfaces for paint.
City Palette Color Consultation
The official palette is organized by color group for stucco, siding, trim and accent, and HOA members are bound by the same palette. It can be viewed at City Hall, with an online version listed as coming soon. Our color consultation, offered case by case, starts from those groups: we narrow the body, trim and accent choices, paint sample patches on your walls and give you a final list that matches the permit application.
Stucco Repaints for 1970s Homes
Around 50 years of settling, on ground mapped for liquefaction, can leave hairline and wider cracks in stucco. Our stucco repair and painting washes the walls, cuts out and fills each crack with a flexible patch, blends the texture and primes the repairs. Body colors come from the palette's stucco group, while the coating type, elastomeric or breathable acrylic, depends on how much a wall still moves.
Brick and Stone Masking on Exterior Jobs
Cerritos requires natural decorative masonry, including brick, stone and block, to keep its natural unpainted color. That shapes the prep: we mask veneer, wainscots and walls before rolling or spraying and cut in by brush where stucco or siding meets masonry. Our exterior house painting covers siding, trim, doors, gates and shutters, all of which fall under the Paint Color Permit.
Fascia Prep After Re-Roofs
The city's re-roof conditions require replaced or unpainted shiplap and fascia to be painted to match the trim, under a separate Paint Color Permit. A new roof is therefore a good time to look hard at the eave line. As prep for that paint, our dry rot repair probes fascia and rafter ends, fills sound wood with epoxy and swaps out soft boards, so the trim color goes on solid wood.
Popcorn Ceiling Removal Before Interior Paint
If a ceiling in a house this age still has its sprayed acoustic texture, we have it tested for asbestos before anyone scrapes it. Only after a clear lab result does our popcorn ceiling removal go ahead, and only as part of painting the room. We wet-scrape the texture, skim coat the ceiling smooth, prime it and paint it along with the walls.
Cerritos Paint Color Permits and Other Rules
Planning Division approval comes before any home improvement project in Cerritos, and applications go through the city's Permit Hub. For exterior painting or staining, that means a Paint Color Permit under Municipal Code Chapter 22.70, which the city issues at no charge, and painting without one is an infraction.
Homes in a homeowners association also need an HOA approval with the paint application. Changing the palette itself takes a Planning Commission resolution, so the choices stay stable from one job to the next.
Building and Safety, run as an LA County contract office at City Hall, handles any work that needs a building permit once Planning signs off. No fire hazard zones were recommended for Cerritos, so California's Wildland-Urban Interface Code (Title 24, Part 7), the code that replaced CBC Chapter 7A on January 1, 2026, barely applies to homes here.
