Painting Tips
How to Handle Change Orders on a Painting Job
Quick answer: A change order is a written, priced, approved addition or alteration to the scope you originally agreed. Raise it immediately, before doing the…
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Painting Tips
Tips, guides, and advice for painting contractors on pricing, estimating, and growing your business.
Painting Tips
How to Avoid Underbidding a Painting Job
Quick answer: Underbidding is almost never a math mistake. It is a scope you did not see or did not write down, plus costs you…
Painting Tips
How to Do a Painting Job Walkthrough
Quick answer: Walk the job in a fixed order (outside first or room by room, never randomly), measure the surfaces that drive labor, photograph every…
Painting Tips
How to Price a Painting Job by the Hour (and When Not To)
Quick answer: Price by the hour internally, sell by the job externally. Hourly is the right way to cost a painting job, because hours are…
Painting Tips
How to Estimate Paint and Material Costs for a Job
Quick answer: Estimate materials in two passes. First the coatings (paintable area divided by real spread rate, times coats, plus a waste allowance, with primer…
Painting Tips
How to Account for Prep Time in a Painting Estimate
Quick answer: Price prep by tiering the surface condition (light, medium, or heavy) and applying that tier as a multiplier to your base production rate,…
Painting Tips
How to Calculate Painting Labor Cost (The Formula Most Painters Get Wrong)
Quick answer: Painting labor cost is paintable area divided by your production rate to get man hours, then man hours multiplied by your loaded labor…
Painting Tips
How to Estimate Paint for a Whole House
Quick answer: Estimate paint for a whole house by measuring each room’s walls, ceilings and trim, dividing every surface by roughly 350 to 400 square…
Painting Tips
How to Measure a Ceiling for Paint
Quick answer: A ceiling’s paintable area equals the room’s floor footprint, length times width. There are no windows or doors to subtract, so divide that…
Painting Tips
How to Calculate Paint for Trim and Doors
Quick answer: Add up the linear feet of all your trim, multiply by the trim’s face width in feet to get square feet, then divide…