In July of 2023, I began editing the website with no prior experience in website development. You can read more about that project here. At the time, I had the same problem many contractors and marketing agencies run into: a serious lack of real content. I did not want to use stock photos. They look fake, staged, and completely disconnected from the kind of work we actually do in people’s homes.
So we started taking pictures of our work. A lot of pictures. Before long, I realized many of those photos needed explanations. A cracked ceiling, substantial drywall damage, a water-damaged ceiling, or a complicated repair does not always make sense from a single photo or even a series of photos.
Back in 2011, I had created a simple company blog on Blogspot, then completely forgot about it for the next twelve years.
In December 2023, I rediscovered that old Blogspot blog and started using it. I renamed it The Painter's Blog of WNY. What started as a forgotten blog soon transitioned into the foundation for what is now known as The Carrigan Archives.
At first, the blog was mainly used to host project photos for www.CarriganPainting.com. Then I began writing about the jobs themselves, explaining what we found, what we repaired, and why certain materials were used. Over time, I became faster and more efficient at documenting our work. Eventually, I outgrew Blogspot entirely.
On August 4, 2024, I moved it to dedicated hosting and officially launched The Carrigan Archives. On January 17, 2026, more than a year after The Carrigan Archives launched, I registered the domain CarriganArchives.org, giving The Archives its own dedicated domain and identity. In the fall of 2026, work began developing CarriganArchives.org as the permanent home of The Carrigan Archives. The original 2022–2026 collection will remain permanently at blog.carriganpainting.com and at its existing URLs. The subdomain reflects how the collection began, not what The Carrigan Archives became. When I chose that address, I had no idea the project would grow into the largest, most organized dedicated digital library of its kind ever created. Beginning in 2027, all new projects, case studies, research, and documentation will be published directly on CarriganArchives.org, establishing the .org as the permenant, active publishing home of The Carrigan Archives.
I did not set out to create an archive. There was no master plan. I simply wanted a place to share our work outside of social media. Two years later, the statistics are difficult even for me to believe. With hundreds of documented projects, it has grown into something much larger than I ever could have imagined.
The Archives is organized by substrate, town, service type, housing era, house style, type of damage, source of damage, room, materials, paints and primers, and evolving organizational infrastructure.
Instead of relying on large portfolios, we document real projects, real conditions, real repairs, and real results from homes throughout the Western New York suburbs.
Every article, project, photograph, and repair documented within The Carrigan Archives was written by the owner and founder of Carrigan Painting. No marketing agency. No ghostwriters. No AI created content. No photographers. No outsourced content team. Just real projects, one job at a time, documented by the same people who performed the work.
Visit The Carrigan Archives
Our Limited Use of Social Media
Carrigan Painting maintains a deliberately limited presence on social media. Due to security, account-control, and long-term content ownership concerns associated with third-party platforms, we publish our project documentation, field observations, pictures, and company updates on The Carrigan Archives.
The Carrigan Archives is where we maintain a permanent record of our work from 2023 - present.
Put plainly, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has repeatedly violated our trust by allowing hackers to gain unauthorized access to our accounts with out sending us so much as an email. Security theater, is not security. We will not rely on third-party social media platforms to protect our reputation, preserve our content, maintain access to our audience, or safeguard the digital identity of a highly rated local business we have spent more than 16 years building.