How To Estimate Painting Jobs

Hi, kids, my name's Tom. I work for Aspect Maintenance. I'm a painter and decorator.

If you're estimating a job, so you're trying to work out how long it's going to take you to paint , say for example this kitchen, there's a couple of things you need to bear in mind. One, preparation time. So you need to look around you and think.

If the walls are in very good condition they might not need much filling or preparing. However, if they're damaged like this for example, where you've got blind sections of plaster; which is actually going to need scraping back, priming and stabilizing. And then filling smooth and rubbing back.

That's going to take you the best part., you have to do that on the first day, and you can't do any painting. So, if you've allowed yourself a day to go around and prepare all the surfaces in this room for example before you start painting, that's your first day. Included in preparation you would need to take into account any woodwork.

So for example for this window you would need to rub it back and prepare it before it could be painted. If it's bare wood it would require priming and under coating. So you would allow for a quick dry primer and then and an undercoat in a day.

You couldn't put your top coat on; you would have to come back to it the next day. So you just need to think to yourself how many days it's going to take to do all these various stages of preparation, your undercoat and your filling before you can put a top coat on. Once you've done that you then go to think, what color am I going into? If you're going into a dark color, say on a white wall, to put this into a deep red or something like that, you would need to put on at least three coats.


The first coat will start to block out the white, the second coat will start to look more solid and the third coat should arriving to a stage where it starts to look finished and flat. Allowing for drying times; that's going to take you at least two days because you can't put three coats on in a day. Together with our preparation.

you add all those things in you might be looking at four to five days to paint the kitchen if you wanted to do it properly.

And that's how you basically you would estimate on times for a painting and decorating job.