Turn east off US-1 in Jensen Beach, cross the causeway, and head north on A1A along Hutchinson Island until Nettles Boulevard breaks off toward the Indian River. That’s the entrance to one of the most unusual housing stocks on the whole Treasure Coast: roughly 1,580 lots packed onto a mostly man-made island, where an original 1970s aluminum-skinned park model can sit a few feet from a two-story block house built decades later.
A note on geography, because locals notice: the island is in St. Lucie County, just north of the Martin County line, while the mail comes out of Jensen Beach 34957, a Martin County post office. Both are correct.
We’ve already written the city-by-city exterior guide for the Treasure Coast, and that one assumes what most homes here are: CBS block under stucco. This post covers the substrates it skips — chalked aluminum, aged vinyl, thin-gauge skirting, and elevated homes with a stair run and an exposed underside — and why a system that performs beautifully on a Tradition stucco wall will fail on a Nettles Island panel.
Why this island has four substrates instead of one
Nettles Island was built in a way nowhere else around here was. Outdoor Resorts of America bought the property in 1969 and had close to two million cubic yards of fill pumped off the bottom of the Indian River to raise the upland, then ringed it with miles of seawall and cut it through with canals. Lot sales started in 1971, and the original product was a vacation resort: trailer pads and small seasonal units, not permanent housing. Fifty-plus years of owners upgrading, re-siding, adding on and in many cases tearing down and rebuilding produced today’s mix. Walk one street and you’ll find:
Original aluminum-skinned manufactured homes and park models. Painted at the factory decades ago, and the giveaway is the chalk — run a dry hand down a sunny elevation and it comes back white. That powder is the resin binder breaking down under UV, and it is the single most common reason a repaint out here fails: new paint bonds to the powder instead of the metal and peels off in sheets, sometimes within one season.
Vinyl siding from re-skins and additions. Vinyl moves a lot with temperature and it has a heat-distortion limit. Paint it too dark and the panel buckles, sags or pulls loose from its fasteners — a failure no coating fixes afterward. Sherwin-Williams’ own direction is to paint vinyl no darker than the original color of the siding, favoring whites, off-whites and pastels, or to work inside their VinylSafe palette of 100 colors, which includes a limited range of darker options formulated to resist warping on sound vinyl.
Newer concrete block rebuilds. The teardown-and-rebuild wave produced two-story block homes, often with poured-and-steel-filled cells and standing-seam aluminum roofing. These are conventional masonry paint jobs and follow the same logic as any stucco repaint schedule on the Treasure Coast, just on a shorter cycle because of where they sit.
Skirting, stairs, railings, decking and pilings. Every home has some of this, and it’s where salt and standing water do their worst work. On elevated homes it’s most of the visible surface area.
Substrate by substrate: what fails and what it needs
| Substrate | Where you see it | How it fails here | What it actually needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Factory-painted aluminum siding | Original park models and 1970s–80s units | Chalking, oxidation, peeling in sheets over old chalk | Soft wash to bare, dry-hand check, direct-to-metal bonding primer, then 100% acrylic |
| Vinyl siding | Re-skins, additions, Florida rooms | Heat buckling from too-dark color; brittleness and cracking with age | Color no darker than original or a VinylSafe color; bonding primer on glossy panel |
| CBS block and stucco | Newer two-story rebuilds | Hairline cracking, salt-driven efflorescence | Crack repair, masonry primer on bare block, coastal-rated acrylic topcoat |
| Vented aluminum or vinyl skirting | Nearly every non-slab home | Denting, water driven behind, hidden mildew | Low-pressure cleaning only, spot-prime bare metal, satin acrylic |
| Stairs, railings, pilings, decking | Elevated and stilt homes | Rust bleed at fasteners, salt film, foot-traffic wear | Rust-inhibitive spot priming, purpose-matched coating per material |
That table is the real answer to “what does it cost to paint a house on Nettles Island” — two homes with identical square footage can be very different jobs.
The pressure washer problem
Manufactured-home siding is thin-gauge. Aluminum panel of that thickness dents when a pressure washer tip gets close, and once dented it stays dented under the new paint. Aged vinyl gets brittle after decades of Florida UV and cracks rather than flexes. Worse than the cosmetic damage, high-pressure water aimed upward gets driven behind the laps, into the wall cavity, and behind skirting where there’s insulation, ductwork and plumbing and no fast path back out. On a home that sits closed and unconditioned part of the year, that’s a mildew problem you just installed.
Soft washing does the job better anyway: a cleaning solution releases mildew, chalk and salt film chemically, then a low-pressure rinse carries it away. We’ve laid out the full comparison in soft washing vs. pressure washing — it’s the method behind our exterior cleaning service and we use it on every one of these homes.
Stilt and elevated homes: access is half the job
Elevated homes change the work in ways a satellite photo will miss.
The underside is a real surface. Beams, joists, soffit panels and the underside of decking all sit in salt-laden air moving off the water, and they’re the first place fastener rust bleeds through a finish. They also can’t be sprayed casually — that’s a masked, hand-worked area over your parking pad, your neighbor’s lot, or in some cases the water.
Stair runs and railings are labor, not square footage. One exterior stair with stringers, treads, risers, posts and a top rail can hold more linear feet of edge than an entire wall, and it’s the surface people touch daily. It gets prepped as its own scope.
Lots are tight. Homes here sit close together, and canal-front lots put docks, seawall, boats and screen enclosures directly in the work zone. Overspray control isn’t optional — it means containment, wind judgment, and on some elevations backrolling by hand instead of spraying at all.
Salt sets the schedule
Every home on this island is a waterfront home. Ringed by seawall, cut by canals, with the Atlantic beach directly across A1A to the east — salt deposition never stops, and it’s why coatings out here run the barrier-island clock of about 5–7 years rather than the 7–10 an inland home can reach. That’s the same math behind exterior painting in Jensen Beach generally, just at the harsher end of it.
Product selection matters more than usual. Our breakdown of the best exterior paints for Florida heat and salt air covers the reasoning; the short version is that we specify Sherwin-Williams systems where the primer and topcoat are engineered to work together on that specific substrate.
The cheapest life extension available is an annual rinse to strip the salt film. On the same street, with the same paint, the homes that get washed hold color visibly longer.
Cost and association paperwork
Full exterior repaints at KB run $3,500–$6,500. Most Nettles Island homes are compact enough to sit toward the lower end of that band; what pushes a number up here isn’t wall area but substrate count and access — a stilt home with a stair run, an exposed underside, skirting, railings and a dock-side elevation is several different jobs stacked on one lot. Multi-structure or unusually large scope moves above that range, and we’d say so rather than pretend otherwise.
Before any of it, there’s the association. Nettles Island is a condominium — the association calls itself site condominiums, not a single-family HOA — with its own recorded documents, rules and regulations, and procedures governing contractor and building activity. Colors, scope and the contractor on your lot can all be subject to review, and the island office is the authority on what your submission needs — call them first and get the approval in writing. We hand you the chips, product data sheets and our certificate of insurance for the packet, and we don’t set a start date until you’re cleared. Same drill as any exterior painting project inside a managed community.
One scheduling note: many owners here are seasonal. If your home sits closed for months, tell us — it changes when we wash, how long we let surfaces dry, and which elevations we tackle first.
Who’s doing the work
KB Painting & Refinishing is family-owned by Braiden and Kaylee Smith, founded in 2019, and the crew that shows up brings 25+ years of combined experience to the sprayer. Our own W-2 employees, never subcontractors. Fully insured. Sherwin-Williams products, a 5-year workmanship warranty on exterior painting, a 4.9-star rating across 350+ Google reviews, and Winner, 2026 Treasure Coast Community’s Choice Awards.
If you own on Nettles Island and want an honest read — which substrate you actually have, whether that chalk comes off, and what the stairs and underside add — request a free estimate or call (772) 222-3227. Ten minutes on your lot beats any number produced from an aerial photo.
KB Painting & Refinishing — family-owned, founded in 2019, serving the Treasure Coast and South Florida with our own crew and no subcontractors. Insured, BBB A+, Google Guaranteed. [email protected].
