Custer sits at 5,315 ft — nearly 2,000 ft above Rapid City. Nights there run roughly 6–7 °F colder, and at the start and end of the season that is the whole margin. A week that is workable in town can be a week that will not cure in Custer.
It is also the oldest settled town in the Black Hills, founded in 1875, and it is surrounded by ponderosa. The stock reflects both: older houses in town, cabins and timber-clad homes in the pines around them.
The exterior season opens later in Custer and closes earlier than anywhere else we go. We would rather say so in April and book you for June than start something in May that spends its first night below the temperature it needed.
Log walls, timber siding, big exposed decks. Coating a log home is a different craft from coating lap siding, with different failure modes — and at 5,300 ft with thin, bright air, the south and west elevations age visibly faster than the rest.
US-16 and US-385 through Keystone is a mountain highway. It is about fifty minutes on a clear day and appreciably longer behind summer traffic heading for Mount Rushmore. Custer gets booked as full days for the same reason Spearfish does.
Four services, everywhere. What changes town to town is which one the phone rings about — and in Custer it is not the same one as in Rapid City.
The signature Custer job. Timber and log exteriors, and decks that take altitude sun from both sides of noon.
Exterior inside a narrower window than anywhere else on this list. Interior any time.
The indoor work that makes a winter trip worthwhile.
Cabin interiors, and best scheduled outside the tourist season.
The workable exterior window here is the shortest we deal with. A conversation in March gets you a good week in the middle of the season; a call in September may not.
Month by month for the whole region: the Black Hills painting calendar.
Free Estimates, and 5-year warranty on the work itself. Call or text — both reach Manny directly.
What the warranty covers is written out on the warranty page, in as much detail as we currently have in writing.
3,409 ft · 60 min from Rapid City
Grouped by geography, not by alphabet — two towns on the same road get scheduled together, and that is usually worth something on the quote.