One of the most practical approaches to breathe new life into your room or even into your old house is by painting it in your favorite color. Painting your home can provide a variety of benefits. However, even before you start choosing the paint color to use in your house painting activity, it is important to establish a working budget to give you an idea of the total cost to paint a house. Learning how to obtain a home painting estimate is crucial to the success of your house painting activities.
Understanding the Cost of Painting a House
According to Home Advisor, the usual cost to paint a house can range as low as $360 to as high as $4,500 with the national average usually pegged at $1,755. Home Advisor also says that generally, homeowners would be spending about $988 to $2,722 for every paint job. What you need to understand is that while these figures can give you an idea of how much budget to earmark for the project, there are a lot of factors that can play into the final home painting estimate.
How to Estimate Painting Jobs
With the knowledge above, you can actually make an interior or exterior painting estimate yourself. Or you can use a paint cost estimator online. Technically you will be asked a set of questions that will help the make a house painting estimate. Questions about the type of space that you’re going to paint on, whether it is inside or outside your home, will be typically asked. They may also ask if this is an entirely new paint job or is it a repaint. Some online home painting quotes may also ask you about the number of rooms that you want to paint as well as total floor area of the space you are going to paint. These are just the basic stuff, of course, but they do a pretty good job of providing you good house painting quotes.
How Do Painters Quote Jobs
Unfortunately, relying on online services does have its drawbacks. There can be a lot of factors involved in the paint job estimation process that cannot be assessed efficiently. As such your best recourse will still be to get the services of professional painters who can give you an honest estimate of your painting job. So how do painters quote jobs?
First they will make an estimate of the cost of paint which typically depends on the brand as well as the quality of the paint. This usually ranges from $15 to $80, although if you’ve got excellent rapport with the contractor, you might even enjoy a discount.
Then, they will have to estimate the number of gallons that will be needed to complete the project. Now you do have to understand that everything depends on the status of your existing paint whether it will require some form of stripping or not. Generally, when contractors share their apprentices the tricks on how to estimate paint costs they will look at the body panels and the trim of the space that is going to be painted on. For example a typical house painting estimate for a 1,500 square foot house will be something like 8 gallons for the exterior surfaces and 2 gallons for the trim. If you also need to paint the interior, then you have to double the estimate to 16 and 4, respectively.
Professional painters will then have to factor-in the cost of the materials to be used in the painting job. These can include rolls of masking plastic and paper, rolls of tape, paint primer, and tubes of caulk. The cost of these materials actually depend on the amount of preparatory work that needs to be done, the amount of roof line in your home, the number of windows, and the number of bricks, if any, on the walls of the house.
There’s a lot of things that need to be considered when it comes to coming up with an honest interior and/or exterior painting estimate. The point is that you’re better off leaving the ‘how to estimate painting jobs’ to the experts as they can provide you with a more transparent assessment of every conceivable factor that can affect the final estimate. The other good thing is that should you decide to get their services in painting your home, you might even save some through rebates or discounts.
If you’re ready to find out how much it would cost you to paint your home, feel free to contact us to get a free custom quote for your home paint job. An in person inspection and discussion with the owner is much more accurate than an online paint cost estimator.