Interior painting in Amherst & Williamsville, NY — what I do, and what it costs you.

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.

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.

Interior paint in this climate generally holds up eight to twelve years on walls that actually get used. The test is equally simple: chalking (a powdery film that rubs onto your hand), scuffing that won’t wipe away, and hairline cracks at the caulk line where the wall meets the trim. 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.

And none of it runs on a season. You repaint when the room stops cleaning up or when you want it to look different — scuffed hallways and a kitchen that has seen a decade of cooking are the two commonest 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.

When a room actually needs repainting, and when it can wait →

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.

What that means in dollars, per square foot →