What I do, and what it costs you in time and money.

Interior walls and ceilings

What’s included: moving and covering furniture, protecting floors, filling nail holes and small cracks, sanding, caulking gaps at trim, priming bare patches, and two finish coats. Everything put back where it was.

How long: a typical bedroom is a day. A full interior is three to six days depending on size, ceiling height and how much patching there is.

Not included: major drywall repair, water-damage remediation, wallpaper removal, or paint on the ceiling if you only asked for walls. If any of that turns up I’ll stop and tell you before it becomes a change order.

Exterior siding and trim

What’s included: pressure-washing, scraping loose paint, sanding edges, priming bare wood and any bare metal, caulking seams and joints, and two coats on a stretch of dry weather. Trim, soffits and fascia included when they’re part of the same job.

How long: three to seven days for a typical Amherst two-storey, weather permitting. Western New York weather is the real variable here, and I’d rather wait a day than paint into a storm.

Not included: rotted wood replacement, gutter work, power-washing a deck you didn’t ask about, or painting masonry with anything other than masonry paint. Rot behind siding is the one thing that genuinely changes a price, and I’ll show you the board before I touch it.

Doors and trim

What’s included: sanding, filling, caulking, priming and two coats. Interior doors taken off their hinges and painted flat where they can cure properly.

How long: a door and its casing is a few hours of work across two days, because the coats need to dry between.

Not included: repairing a door that doesn’t close properly, or hardware replacement. I’ll tell you if it needs a carpenter instead of me.

Small cabinet refreshes

What’s included: doors and drawer fronts removed, degreased, sanded, primed with a bonding primer and finished with two coats of a hard cabinet enamel. Boxes painted in place.

How long: four to six days, mostly drying time. Your kitchen stays usable throughout.

Not included: new hardware, new doors, refacing, or anything structural. This is for a kitchen that looks tired, not one being rebuilt. If your cabinet boxes are failing, paint is the wrong answer and I’ll say so.

Should you paint yet?

This is the question worth asking first, and it’s the one nobody gets paid to answer honestly.

Exterior paint in this climate generally holds up eight to twelve years. The test is simple: look for chalking (a powdery film that rubs onto your hand), peeling edges, and bare wood showing through. If you have none of those, you probably don’t need me yet — and repainting early doesn’t extend the life of what’s there, it just spends the money sooner.

Interior paint has no such clock. You repaint when you want the room to look different, not because it’s wearing out. Scuffed hallways and a kitchen that’s seen a decade of cooking are the two most common reasons people call me, and neither is really about failure.

If I come out and your paint is fine, I’ll tell you to wait. I’d rather lose the job than have you tell your neighbors I sold you a paint job you didn’t need.

Why prep is most of the bill

Paint is cheap. The first coat on a well-prepped wall is easy. What costs money is everything before that: scraping edges back to sound material, sanding them feathered so you can’t see where the old paint ended, filling and sanding again, caulking every joint that water could get into, and priming anything bare.

Paint that fails almost never failed because it was the wrong paint. It failed because it went over something that was still moving, still damp, or still dirty. That’s the part you can’t photograph and the part that decides whether you’re looking at it again in three years or ten.

So when a quote looks unusually cheap, the prep is usually what got left out — and it’s your house that finds out.