Painting the town

Get in line if you want your Hyde Park bungalow painted by Dave Collins, a meticulous craftsman who specializes in old wood houses.

By TAYLOR WARD
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 1, 2002

[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar] Getting your old wood house painted by Dave Collins, can be tough. He is Hyde Park's most in-demand restoration painter.

The old wood houses of Hyde Park are a kind of quiet status symbol for people who prefer trusty Volvos to shiny Ferraris, old Coach to new Gucci.

And, as with many things antique and low-tech, "charming" often equals "high maintenance."

So, with the epic paint jobs required to protect the beloved bungalows of Hyde Park comes another coveted emblem of labor-intensive quality:

Getting your old wood house painted by Dave Collins.

As Hyde Park's most in-demand restoration painter, Collins sometimes has to keep clients waiting as long as two years before he can get to their chipping Craftsman or their peeling Prairie-style.

His exacting technique and attention to detail are so apparent that he moves straight from one word-of-mouth referral to the next. He works often on the same block, sometimes next door, and almost always in Hyde Park since he started almost 30 years ago.

"I was so taken by his commitment to the job," says Chris Tollette, who watched Collins work on a neighbor's townhouse on Rome Avenue in 1994. "He was there every morning at 7 or before, and he worked alone. I found out why -- he's so meticulous that no one can work up to his standard.

"His standards are high, but you love him for it," Tollette says.

She hired Collins to paint her townhouse later that year, and hired him again when she and her husband, Tom, moved to a two-story bungalow on Newport Avenue in 1996.

Neighbors John and Pat Newcomer hired him in 2000 to paint their two-story 1917 bungalow, a job that took eight months.

From the Newcomer house, Collins went to Patty Melanson's cream-colored 1912 foursquare on Dakota, where he can stand in the front yard and point to five other houses he has worked on in the past decade.

"I feel sorry for some of the old houses," he says, his gray mustache flecked with paint, his compact frame braced against a January breeze.

"You've gotta prep 'em. Everybody wants to paint, but nobody wants to prep. And it's a lot of work.

"I like to say that the current owners are caretakers -- they keep the house up enough for the next family to move in and be caretakers. But you've gotta love these old wood homes. If you didn't love 'em, they'd all be aluminum."

Balanced on an 18-foot ladder under the eaves of Melanson's house, Collins taps his chisel handle on peeling paint and explains how deep love goes.

"This is just the picking part, to see what's what," he says. "The scraping comes later. This part could take weeks."

Collins doesn't love paint so much as he loves wood -- good old wood.

Glopped-on cheap paint or dreaded aluminum siding holds water and heat next to wood and ruins it, Collins says. So he takes the paint down to the wood whenever possible. And he mostly does it the old fashioned way, with a scraper.

"The best ones are the ones that have been neglected -- the paint comes right off," he says. "Those turn out really nice. A lot of times, people think it's going to heck, but it's not. I can fix it. The old wood is almost better without paint."

Collins, 53, says he learned to appreciate wood and learned how to care for it while working on boats at his grandfather's small vacation resort in upstate New York.

Later, he worked as a welder on high steel, framing skyscrapers in New York and New Jersey. He came to Tampa in 1972, so he could enjoy working outside year-round, and found a niche in Hyde Park from the start.

"Back in the '70s, this place was hippies and yippies and carved-up duplexes. Now it's new money coming in and fixing it up," he says "And thank God, because the old money doesn't always have the wherewithal to do it."

Still, Collins functions as a link to the old neighborhood, remembering the names of kids and dogs who pass by on the sidewalk. He can tell the story of the 80-year-old man who's lived in the house across the street since he was 4 or explain why there's a brick pumphouse near the alley. And he provides the kind of old-fashioned extra services that people appreciate almost as much as his painting skills. His business card says "the painter you can trust with your house keys.'"

People trust him with more, like their mail and their pets.

"He's got the key, he feeds my cat, he notices things that need to be fixed," Patty Melanson says. "He gives you peace of mind when he's there."

Melanson says she's even developed a unique relationship with Collins, somewhat akin to the one Candice Bergen had with her workman in Murphy Brown. "The other morning, I was still in bed when I heard Dave setting up his ladder outside my bedroom window. When my alarm went off, I heard, "Get up, Patty!' I said "No Dave, I'm hittin' the snooze!' "

When he's not painting other people's houses, Collins works on his own 1934 bungalow in Dover, which he shares with his wife and two cats. On his 3 acres, he runs a small preservation salvage business called Old Wood Things and restores 1955 Chevys. He met his wife, DeDe, fittingly enough when he was painting the building where she worked.

"I was afraid he was going to get paint on my car, so I said something to him," DeDe recalled of the 1987 meeting. "He said "Don't worry.' Then we talked. Eventually he asked me out."

They each have three children from previous marriages.

"She says she'd rather have me be a painter than a lawyer, 'cause a lawyer couldn't take care of her old wood house," Collins says, chuckling. "Of course, you have to be a lawyer to afford to pay a painter to keep up these old houses."

This may be true.

Attorney John Newcomer paid Collins almost $20,000 to finish his house last year.

"But I'm not so sure he costs more in the long run," Newcomer says. "A vivid demonstration is that the house to the right of me was painted by Dave three years ago and looks fine. The house on the left was painted by someone else, and it already needs re-doing."

The house on the right belongs to the Tollettes, who have paid Collins quite a bit through the years.

But to them, Collins is more than a painter. He is invited to their Christmas party each year.

"Anytime we have a neighborhood party, we invite Dave and DeDe," Chris Tollette says. "He's so much a part of the neighborhood."

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