How Long Does Interior Painting Take?

How Long Does Interior Painting Take?

There are a ton of reasons a homeowner might want to paint the interior of their home. Repainting the space you live in can do a lot for you. It can give your home a brand new look and feel no matter its age. It can freshen the air in your home and encourage a cleaner environment. It can make your décor fit in better or simply bring it all into the 21st century. Whatever reason you have for doing it, painting your home interior is well worth it.

But even after you’ve made the initial decision to have your interior painted there are a few other questions you’ve got to think about. Aside from the major task of choosing what colors you’re going to use, you’ll have to consider things like, how long is this project going to take? And that’s a pretty important question actually.

Having the interior of your home painted is very different from having the exterior painted. The process is the same for both but having the interior of your home painted is going to more directly affect your life and day to day activities. For example, if you hire a company to paint the exterior, they can do it without any major changes for you. If you hire a company to do the interior, they’re going to be painting inside your home, furniture is going to need to be moved, light fixtures and switches taken down and so on.

So for the purpose of your life and home getting back to normal as soon as possible, how long the process is going to take is an important one. So… how long does it take?

Will you DIY or hire a professional?

A big thing to think about when trying to answer the timeline question is who is going to be the one to do your interior painting. A lot of people assume that painting isn’t as time consuming as it is and decide they’ll do the project themselves. There’s nothing wrong with this, but if you want it done efficiently and quickly then you’re probably not going to want to do it yourself. You’ll probably want to hire interior painting professionals who know what they’re doing.

The fact is painting can take a lot of time, especially for homeowners who have their own busy schedules. Work-life and family-life can leave you pretty tired at the end of the day and the next thing you know your weekend project has taken you two months to finish. While you may feel this isn’t the case for you, it’s definitely something that can affect how long your interior painting job takes before it’s finished.

And if you hire someone to paint your interior for you, you are often going to get three or four people to come out and paint. Three or four painters who paint for a living are going to get the job done much more quickly than one of you with other obligations in addition.

Is it the whole house or one room?

Obviously how many rooms you are having painted will determine whether your project is done quickly or not. You can paint just one room at a time which can be done surprisingly quickly or you can paint the whole house, and often painting companies will give you some sort of a deal for painting more than one room. Going hand in hand with how many rooms you’re going to have painted, the size of the area you want to have painted will basically determine how long it’ll take to be done.

The time required for interior painting depends a lot on how many square feet are to be painted. It also goes hand in hand with the question of whether you’ll be doing it alone or not. One person will paint much more slowly than a team. A medium room about 12’x12’ can take about 5 to 6 hours to be done to professional standards, but that doesn’t always include preparation and trim painting. On a larger scale, 12,000 sq. ft. home can take less than a week to paint. If you want a definite number, we offer free estimates that you can take advantage of.

Is the space old or new?

Believe it or not, the age of the area to be painted can be a major factor when figuring out how long it will take to paint the interior of your home. Painting the walls, trim and ceiling of a new home or addition are easy to do. They don’t take long as they don’t require much preparation. They’re new-ness means that they haven’t had much time to acquire buildup of dirt and old flakey paint. They don’t have layers of wallpaper and deep scratches and holes. Or rather, hopefully they don’t.

Older areas though require more work. They need more cleaning for those old stains and dirt to be removed. They need old paint scrapped off and old wallpaper taken off. If those things aren’t carefully removed in the preparation period then the paint can’t properly adhere and your paint job was all for nothing. Lastly, if the walls are damaged they’ll need to be repaired – whether that entails caulking, patching and/or sanding – and that alone means you’ll require more time.

Essentially, the older a home is the more prep work it’s bound to need. Preparation requirements are factored into the cost and the timeframe just as much as the square footage is. The more preparation a place needs – the more time you’ll have to figure in.

What colors and designs are you using?

The colors and designs you use might not seem like they’d really change much, but they actually do when it comes to your allotted work time. If it’s an initial paint job it will take longer than a touch up job, and it will require significantly more effort and time. A basic paint job is usually one application of white paint on the ceiling and then two coats of a colored paint on the walls. Some quality paints include a primer, and some purport that they only require one coat. But a lot of the painting coat requirements you will have will depend on the quality of the paint.

If you’re painting walls in the same room different colors, or applying different patterns and colors all on one wall – it’s going to take more time. For proper application of the unique look you want, the project will definitely need more time. Darker colors, like deep reds, can need three or even four coatings which equals more time. In other instances if you’re changing from a dark color to a lighter one you will again need extra coatings. You already know what that means.

Talk to the Professionals

Ultimately, when you’re trying to figure out how long it will take to paint the interior of your home, you should just go talk to the professionals. It’s hard to estimate how long it can take because, as you can see, there are a lot of factors involved. Each project has a different size and level of difficulty. Different paints do different types of work and sometimes the preparation needed for the project can be on either end of the scale. Sometimes you might need more than one person.

We can give you an estimate of how long the process will take for your home and how much it’ll cost. To get a free estimate, contact us here or call us directly at 239.600.1418.