You’ve booked your interior painting project. The crew arrives Monday. Now what?
We handle all the technical preparation. Filling holes, sanding, caulking, priming, masking, protecting floors. None of that is your job and none of it should appear on an invoice as an extra. But there is a short list of things only you can do, and doing them turns a five-day job into a four-day job.
Here is the honest version of why that matters. On an occupied whole-home repaint we set up and tear down every single day. If a crew spends the first ninety minutes of day one taking pictures off walls, bagging switch plates, and shuffling a dresser away from a wall, that is ninety minutes not spent painting, on a job you are paying for by the day.
1 to 2 Weeks Before
Finalize your colors, and sample them on the actual walls. Not on a card held up to the wall. Large swatches, twelve inches square minimum, viewed in morning light, afternoon light, and lamp light. Pacific Northwest daylight is cool and heavily filtered for most of the year, which pushes grays blue and makes warm whites read cleaner than they did in the store. A color chosen under showroom lighting is a color chosen wrong. Our guide to choosing paint colors walks through the process we use with clients.
Last-minute color changes after materials are purchased cost real money, because tinted paint cannot be returned.
Walk each room and note the problems. Nail pops, hairline cracks, water staining, prior repairs that never quite disappeared, wallpaper adhesive, spots where a previous paint job is peeling. Bring this list to the pre-job walkthrough. We will find most of it ourselves, but you know your house. You know which ceiling stain came back after the roof was fixed and which one didn’t.
Plan for kids and pets. Open equipment, wet surfaces, and crews moving through doorways with full trays are not a good mix with a curious dog. Decide now where they will be, rather than improvising on the morning.
If your home was built before 1980 and has popcorn ceilings you want removed, tell us early. That requires asbestos testing before anyone touches it, and testing takes time to schedule.
2 to 3 Days Before
Take everything off the walls. Pictures, mirrors, floating shelves, clocks, curtain rods, wall-mounted TVs where practical. Put the hardware in a labeled ziplock bag and tape it to the back of the item it came from. This is the single most useful thing on this entire list. It is also the thing that most often gets half-done, and half-done is where hardware disappears.
Clear the small stuff. Nightstands, dressers, bookshelves, countertops, windowsills. Anything valuable, fragile, or irreplaceable should leave the room entirely rather than get covered in place. We are careful, and things still get bumped.
Move electronics away from walls. Desktop computers, gaming consoles, routers, and anything with an intake fan. Sanding dust finds its way into everything with a fan.
The Night Before
Push furniture toward the center of each room. Aim for three feet of clearance from every wall. We will move it if you cannot, and heavy pieces are our job regardless, but every piece you handle is masking time we spend painting instead.
Pull switch plates and outlet covers. Two minutes per room for you, ten minutes per room for a crew that has to work around them or remove and track them across a whole house. Bag the screws with the plates.
Wipe the walls down. A damp cloth removes dust and cobwebs. Kitchen walls near the stove need more than that, because cooking oil residue is invisible on a wall and it will reject paint. If we find grease we will degrease it properly, but a quick pass from you means less of it to find.
Clear driveway or street space for a work vehicle, and let us know if parking is genuinely difficult. In older Seattle neighborhoods and the Edmonds Bowl this is a real scheduling factor, not a courtesy.
The Morning Of
Walk the project with your lead painter. Ten minutes. Confirm colors room by room, point out anything you flagged earlier, and agree on how you want to be reached during the day. Most of the misunderstandings we have ever had would have been prevented by this conversation.
What We Handle, So You Don’t Have To
Filling nail holes and repairing minor drywall damage. Cutting out and taping cracks rather than just filling them, because a filled crack reopens in a season. Matching texture on repairs so the patch disappears under paint. Scuff-sanding glossy trim so the new coat has something to bite into. Caulking gaps. Spot priming, and full priming wherever the color change or the substrate calls for it. Canvas drops on floors, not plastic. Masking fixtures and flooring transitions. Two finish coats on every surface quoted. Daily cleanup, full final cleanup, and leftover paint labeled by room and left with you.
Furniture moving is included too. The list above is about speed, not about shifting our work onto you.
One Thing That Surprises People
Paint is dry to the touch in an hour and fully cured in two to four weeks. In a Puget Sound home in February, with indoor humidity sitting between 50 and 70 percent, the long end of that range is realistic.
Practically, that means furniture can come back the same day but should stay a few inches off fresh walls for 72 hours. Anything pressed hard against a wall inside that window can leave a permanent contact mark. It is the most common avoidable callback we see, and it happens in the first week.
Winter is still the best time to do interior work here. It is unaffected by rain, our schedule is far more open between November and March because exterior work is paused, and lead times are shorter. The cure window is the one adjustment.
If your kitchen is on the list, it is worth pricing cabinet refinishing at the same time. Fresh wall color tends to make dated cabinets look worse, and doing both in one mobilization costs less than two visits.
Ready to book? Get your free interior painting estimate from Paint Gunners. We serve Lynnwood, Kirkland, Bellevue, Bothell, Redmond, and 23 cities across Snohomish and King County.