A theme park in November is a strange, quiet place. The rides are still, the midway is empty, and every building that looked bright and cheerful in July suddenly shows its age: the sun-faded blue of a toll booth, the chalky stucco of a balcony building, log cabins gone gray under their stain. You have until the gates open in May to make all of it look new again, and the date is printed on the tickets.
The Job
In one off-season at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee we repainted three very different sets of buildings: the Hurricane Harbor parking entrance plaza (toll booths, canopies and signage frames), the Bugs Bunny & Co building with its New Orleans-style iron balconies, and a row of frontier-themed log cabins and storefronts. Each had its own colors, its own surfaces and its own problems. All of them had the same deadline.
Three Buildings, Three Jobs
- Hurricane Harbor entrance. Painted steel canopies, wood-sided booths and a tall signage frame, all in the park’s blue and white. Steel was cut back to sound metal and primed; the booths were washed, scraped and finished in a hard enamel because a million cars a season pull up to them.
- Bugs Bunny & Co. A two-storey stucco building wrapped in ornate cast-iron balconies. The stucco took a masonry coating in the themed blue and peach; the ironwork was brushed by hand, scroll by scroll, because a roller cannot get into filigree.
- The frontier cabins. Log and board-and-batten buildings finished in a solid stain so the texture of the logs still shows, with the doors, shutters and trim picked out in the theme colors.
How It Ran
The park was walked with the facilities team in the fall and every building was scoped separately: surfaces, prep, colors, products and days. Steel was prepped first across all three sites while the weather held, then the crews split: one on the entrance plaza, one in the themed sections. Everything was finished and inspected weeks before the gates opened, because at a theme park the deadline is the one thing that does not move.
Theme Parks, Venues and Deadlines
This was the same season we restored the Columbia Carousel, the job most people know us for at the park. Between-season work for parks, venues, HOAs and commercial properties runs on the same rule: scope every surface, start with the steel, and finish early.
Talk to Pete About a Commercial Project
Call (847) 564-4880 or request a site visit online. Pete walks every job himself and gives you a written scope, a firm quote, and a schedule we keep.