Har har, another consumer thread.
Now that Betsy and I’ve ganked the icky carpet downstairs in favor of wood, we’re looking at getting it repainted. About 1000 feet across 2 bedrooms, a bath, a living room - ceiling, walls, trim, and doors.
We just got back our first estimate - $6,700. Putting brand new hunks of wood on the floor only cost $4,500. Geez.
What’s a reasonable price for this, considering Seattle labor costs? It’s surprisingly hard to find this sort of thing online.
erm, 1000$? Tops? That’s quite a market you have there. You’re talking about 8 gallons of paint, mas o menos, and maybe four or five hours for a crew to knock it out, after the prep work is done. I think there must be something I’m missing in the estimate.
H.
Sixty-seven hundred dollars?(!) You could almost buy your own ship for that.
[Edit]: Seriously, that’s ridiculous. If the market’s that bad up there, do it yourselves.
6,500 seems really high.
You could do it your self if you are so inclined. Painting really isn’t that hard.
It shouldn’t be that much, but if you have a lot of color changes (walls one color, trim another, ceiling yet another) it will be more. For reference, I’ve had a 1350 sq ft house painted several different wall colors (but same trim and ceiling color) for around $2000 before. Ask around, someone’s bound to have had some painting done recently. Don’t be scared to ask the painter for references either.
It’s not hard to do yourself, either. A little messy perhaps, but not difficult. If you go this route, though, do check and see if the current paint is oil/lead-based or latex (if its in the past 15-20 years or so, it’s probably latex). If your current paint is oil-based, you’ll need to prime it so that the latex paint won’t lift. You’ll also want to wash the walls with TSP or something else to clean them.
When I was selling a house, I was able to get it painted (for selling, mind you) for $300. That included trim, but I got a reference from my real estate agent, and the guy liked having her for a client, so he cut me a bit of a deal. That said, 6700 is freakin ridiculous. Clearly it’s worth doing yourself if you can’t find a deal MUCH lower than that (like 1/5 at the most).
Some contractors must think “I’m going to throw out a totally ridiculous price to see if this guy fall for it.”
What’s the breakdown? How many hours of labor (which is where the cost is)?
What color are you going from, and what color are you going to? Going from dark to light is more expensive than light to dark (if only because you need to prime it, which kind of doubles the labor).
Are they doing a coat of primer, then sanding, then primer, then sanding, then painting? That might (well, almost certainly will) be overkill, and blows up labor costs.
How complicated are the rooms? Are the walls in good shape? Having to paint around lots of stuff (windows, corners, trim) and/or having to spend time patching up walls adds to the cost.
How many men are doing the work? If one guy would take 10 hours, but they send 2 guys to get it done in 6 hours (1 day), it’ll cost you more (by 2 man hours), but they might do that because they can finish in a day (granted, this doesn’t pair with the overkill 3 coats thing, it’s just something to consider).
Where’s a Hugo Chavez to institute painting price controls when you need him?
Sounds crazy. Why not do it yourself? Painting is easy and if you’re careful an unskilled person can still do a really good job.
Yeah, that does sound crazy. The price of doing it yourself would probably be around $200 at the most. Probably less. And that includes all of the supplies you’ll need, which you then have for future painting projects, and assumes that you’ll be buying top-quality paint (California and Dutch Boy Dimensions are good), which you totally should. It doesn’t take long to paint a room, most of the time you’ll put into the project is in the prepwork. If you live in new(ish) construction, there won’t be a whole lot of that, other than cleaning the walls.
$6700 for interior painting is highway robbery. 98% of that price tag is just labor, and the labor that goes into painting requires very little skill. This is a job that has “sweat equity” written all over it.
Do it yourself. If it costs you more than $1000 (including everything!) and a couple fun weekends painting with your gurf and maybe a friend or two, you’ve been highway robbed in the ass.
Even $1000 is way, way high. He’s painting 1000 square feet. That’s maybe three gallons of good quality paint, plus a gallon or two of primer. Brushes, rollers, tarps, rags, sanding and patching supplies… if that stuff costs you $1000, then you’re still being highway robbed. ;)
Are we talking about painting with compressed air or a brush? Re-texturing the walls or not?
If you do it the hard core professional way with a sprayer, (generally only done when your refurbishing a room), it’s a lot of manual labor.
Using a sprayer to paint a room in your house is sort of like buying a zeppelin to commute to work. Pointless and expensive. You can get better results with a brush and roller (which is what most of the best pro painters use, anyway) for a fraction of the price.
Your analogy sucks, because my first thought was “how totally cool would it be to commute to work in a zeppelin!”
-Tom
Good to see I’m not insane. I was expecting like $3,000, tops.
The guy was pretty insistent on spraying. No primer, only minor sanding, and we’d already bought all the paint ourselves. Rooms are straightforward rectangles with nothing fancy.
In the breakdown, he put pulling the trim and baseboards and painting those at $2,700. I shit you not
Betsy and I have just decided to do it ourselves anyway, she’s painted stuff before.
Ooh, good to know. Thanks.
It’s actually kind of cool to use a sprayer, too, but you really don’t need one. A roller and a few brushes will do the same job, easier and more quickly, for a lot less money. So I’ll stand by my analogy. :)
Also: pulling trimwork? Ugh. That sort of crap is exactly why a sprayer is uncalled for. A skilled painter would do the edging by hand, with a brush, and it would look better. And he wouldn’t charge you $2700 for it.
Jesus even 3,000 sounds like way too much.