Um, $6,500 is like half of the cost to completely remodel most rooms (maybe short of a kitchen).
The guy should basically be punched for insulting you.
And I’ll even paint your zeppelin for $2k. For $500 extra, I’ll do flames up the front. A bargain, compared to those Seattle prices.
On second thought, maybe flames would be in poor taste for a zeppelin.
Okay, make that the scene from the first Star Wars poster airbrushed on one side.
If you owned your own zepplin, you would never have to pay to see a football game again.
I had a roommate who was a professional house painter, and when he moved in he agreed to paint the whole apartment if I did all the prep.
So over the next couple of weeks I scrubbed walls, sanded, taped off windows, and moved and covered furniture.
I’d get a room all prepped and tell him, he’d inspect and tell me all the shit I did wrong, I’d fix it (another couple of days), then he’d walk in with his sprayer, say, “Don’t come in here.” Less than an hour later it would be done.
Granted he was just blasting everything with white, but it was cool how quickly he could knock out a room.
No, it’s perfect! Also, you could paint tromp l’oeil depictions on the side of passengers jumping off in terror.
Your ex-roommate sounds like an asshole.
No, it’s perfect! Also, you could paint tromp l’oeil depictions on the side of passengers jumping off in terror.[/QUOTE]
Awesome.
Totally Agreed… You could take a trip to Germany in that with style.
The last house I lived in (which was 1500sq ft), I had a painter come and do a bunch of work and painting. The work included fixing some drywall cracks from settling, re-texturing almost all of the walls and vaulted ceiling, and painting all of it plus all the trim and doors. He used Sherwin Williams primer and 30yr warranty paint, so it wasn’t cheap stuff, and spent about 5 days doing all the work. He charged me $2500. I did get estimates from other guys, and some were lower, but used cheaper materials.
So with that in mind, $6700 is insane, unless its being done by a bunch of hot college chicks, and they are atleast topless. Then I would say go for it, and recoup some of your cost by charging a cover to your friends to watch.
$6,700 is still way too much, but I fully support the idea.
Want to hear one better? I had a leak in my roof last year after a two day long downpour. I call up a random guy in the phone book to come take a look. He goes up on the roof with a digital camera and takes some pictures, comes back down, and says the whole roof needs to be replaced (it’s a flat roof with tar and gravel). Shows me some pictures.
He gets back to me the next day with a quote of $15,700, saying I need to get it replaced before the next rain or I’ll get deadly mold in the walls, etc. So I grab a ladder and go up there. Not a year beforehand I had gotten a house inspection (before buying) and they guy told me the roof was in great shape.
I find the roof is in excellent condition (took lots of pics and sent them to my Dad just in case, who has tarred and gravelled many, many flat roofs). There is a some minor damage/hole in a part of the roof, about the size of a golfball. The rest is in pristine shape. The gravel is not even sun faded. So I grab a bucket of roof tar ($7) and some paint sticks (free) from Lowes, go up there myself, and slap some tar down. Took less than 20 minutes. It’s held through many, many bad storms since then and I went and checked on it again a few months ago, still looks great.
Savings, $15,697.
Doing stuff around the house is just not that complicated. It really isn’t.
If you have time and a willingness to kill material costs on fuckups, absolutely.
Just be careful about anything that involves code or potentially damaging you or your house. For major electrical work (pulling circuits), permitted construction, and any kind of plumbing, hire it out to a licensed craftsman.
For stuff like demo work, paint, toilet replacement, landscaping (not including trenching), and what not, do it yourself.
For tile, hardwood installation, and framing – that’s a personal call.
Best roommate ever. He lived at his girlfriend’s house and paid his rent on time. He’d stop by occasionally to say hi. In a year of renting, he slept at the apartment twice, when his girlfriend’s family was in town.
1000$ was my Pacific Northwest markup price. Around here, it would be more like 600$. Pulling baseboards? Um, fifteen minutes and a prybar. Same with the trim. A sprayer is ridiculous inside, as well. Find some small handyman who hires immigrant labor, and you’re set.
H.
Heh yeah probably, but it’s still way less than $6K.
I think 1000 feet (including ceilings) is far more than 3 gallons of paint though. I haven’t done interior painting in about five years but I helped a friend of mine from whom I was renting a room. We did just his main “office area” which was 3 walls of a ~200 sq ft room and it took about 3 gallons not including the ceiling. Previously it was papered, so we had to remove that stuff and it didn’t come off just with elbow grease. Needed some solvents and those sputula looking “knives” to get it totally done. Then we spackled up any holes or nicks that f’ed up the texture. Then lay down plastic sheets, masking tape everything (trim, windows, holding tarps, electrical fixtures). Rollers and brushes, etc. All of this stuff is piddly, but not cheap if you don’t have any of it already. I’m thinking all that is $100.
Paint. You will need two coats, the minimum if you are keeping the current color and just freshening it up. Double that if you are going from something dark/loud to something light/subdued. The intarweb suggests about 400 sq ft of wall area per gallon. That’s 5 gallons to do two coats of 1000 feet of wall/ceiling area. To be safe I’d buy two extra gallons; you don’t want to need more and have to go mix more and get a slightly different shade. So at a reasonable $20+ each, that’s another $150. If your trim is to be a different color, that’s another $20 gallon. And so on for each extra color (like if your baseboards are different from window sills or something, or in different rooms).
Add in extra for super-rad textured paints and any other stuff you may want like new switch/outlet plates to match the rooms, etc. Another $100 just as a SWAG. Throw in $100 to buy Subway and sodas for a few friends to come help you out on a Saturday. Round way up to be safe with your budget, and including tax. No more than $500 tops duder.
Also: pulling up baseboards is a waste unless you intend to totally replace them. There’s no good goddamn reason. Paint them or tape them off if they are to be a different color.
Totally agreed on pulling baseboards - that makes no sense for ordinary situations. That’s why they invented masking tape.
My brother did exterior painting for several summers in college. He said there was a big difference in paint quality between good and bad. Bad paint takes more coats to cover, so do your research on this. I assume this applies to interior paint, too.
Otherwise, as all others have said - this should be cheap and reasonably fun, if you have any interest at all in home projects.
Do a good job covering everything with tarps - even if you have to use those cheapie plastic jobs. But real canvas tarps are better if you have access to them, because when a drop of paint falls on a canvas tarp, the paint is basically absorbed. On plastic tarps, the paint just sits there in a liquid pool - waiting for you to step on it or brush up against it at some point.
I don’t see the need for a sprayer - use a roller and a couple brushes.
Basic supplies (NOT counting paint) should be <$30 - assuming you can borrow a stepladder (or have one already).
The nice thing about paint is, even if you mess up, for the most part, it’s pretty easy to fix - just give it another coat.
Masking tip (learned this the hard way), if you are going to be painting baseboards with oil-based, and the walls with latex in a different color to the baseboards. When you mask off the wall to do the baseboards, remember that some paint will always seep under the tape and give you a slightly ragged edge. To solve this, mask off the wall above the baseboard, then paint over the tape edge with the wall color latex paint. The latex paint will seep underneath the tape onto the wall where it doesn’t matter and it will also form a nice seal so the baseboard paint doesn’t seep under onto the wall. Putting oil-based paint on top of latex is fine, but latex on top of oil-based looks weird, so its fine to paint the baseboard paint over the top of the latex there.
Now paint the baseboards and when you pull the tape off, you should have a lovely clean edge where the tape was. Note that the professionals don’t use masking tape to get that edge, they just do it by hand. But I can’t get a steady line, so I have to do the tape trick. I hope that explanation made sense, its hard for me to explain without a diagram.
EL GUAPO, ARE YOU MAD? YOUR ROOF COULD COLLAPSE AROUND YOU AT ANY MOMENT!!1!one
We had the same problem with interior paint estimates (walls, trim, no ceiling, kitchen + cabinets, ~1400 sq ft, 3br, 1.5ba) on our home – many, many thousands of dollars.
We had an entire month of overlap between our rental and owning the new house, so we just said to hell with it and did it ourselves. The only downside is many long days. It’s not too much fun to come home from work at 5pm and work until 10pm painting only to get up the next day and do it all over again.
I don’t mind spending money for jobs that are dangerous and/or take skilled labor, like plumbing and electrical. But painting is just grunt work with a tiny bit of up-front planning.
Throw in $100 to buy Subway and sodas for a few friends to come help you out on a Saturday
I would never, ever ask my friends to help me with shitty manual labor jobs. I just wouldn’t.
But then I really don’t have any friends, so it’s kind of a moot point.
Jason - shift6 and I are coming over to paint your house. I have a nice Roger-Deanesque mural planned for your living room involving a wizard, a flying unicorn, a barbarian and a space princess who look like you and Betsy (I know you want to pose for the space princess), and that scarab from the Journey album covers.
ps: we will just tape over the damn baseboards.
An aside: I’m a huge fan of Porter’s high end stuff ($36/gallon I think) because it’s really, really stain/mark resistant. I believe it’s called “Silken Touch”. With kids around the house, being able to wipe down the walls is really nice.