Painting
How to Prepare Your Home Before the Painters Arrive
A short checklist that saves time, protects your belongings, and keeps the crew painting instead of moving your furniture.
A good crew handles protection and prep as part of the job. But there are things only you can do, and doing them before day one means the crew spends their hours painting rather than working around obstacles. It makes the job faster, cleaner and less disruptive for you.
Interior painting
Take down what's personal or fragile
Photos, artwork, mirrors, wall clocks, curtains and curtain rods. We'll move and cover furniture, but anything irreplaceable or breakable is better in your hands than ours. Small items on shelves and countertops in the work area should be boxed and moved out.
Clear the perimeter
If you can, pull furniture toward the middle of each room and leave a few feet of clearance at the walls. We'll finish moving and covering, but a head start on the heavy pieces speeds up the first morning noticeably.
Empty closets you want painted
Closet interiors are easy to include and easy to forget. If they're in the scope, they need to be empty and the rods clear.
Point out the problems
Walk the house with us on day one and mention:
- Any water stains, even old ones — those need stain-blocking primer or they bleed through
- Cracks that keep coming back, which may be movement rather than a patching issue
- Repairs done previously that didn't hold
- Any surface where you know the existing paint is peeling
We'll find most of it, but you know your house better than we do.
Plan for pets and kids
Doors are open, ladders are up, and there's wet paint at ankle height. Have a plan for where the dog is going to be. It's the most common source of a mess on an interior job.
Decide colors before we start
Get samples on the actual wall and look at them in morning light and evening light — Inland Empire afternoon light is intense and will make a color read warmer than it did in the store. Changing your mind after the first coat is up costs a day and the material.
Exterior painting
Give us access
Unlock gates, and let us know about anything that needs a key or a code. If a dog uses the yard, we'll need a plan for the days we're working back there.
Trim the vegetation
Bushes, vines and tree limbs touching the house have to be cut back or tied away before the walls can be washed and painted. Anything growing against the wall also holds moisture against it, which is worth addressing anyway.
Move what's against the house
Patio furniture, planters, grills, hoses and anything stored along the walls should be pulled away — six feet or so if there's room.
Point out the sprinklers
Tell us your irrigation schedule, or shut it off for the duration. Sprinklers hitting a freshly painted wall overnight is an avoidable problem, and it's one of the more common ways an exterior job gets set back a day.
Expect windows to stay closed
While we're washing, prepping and painting near them, windows need to stay shut. On hot days that's worth knowing in advance.
Both
Parking
The crew needs somewhere close to stage materials, and you'll want your own vehicles clear of overspray zones on an exterior job.
Keep the walk-through in mind
At the end we'll go through the work with you. Bring a critical eye — that's the moment to flag anything you want touched up, not two weeks later.
None of this is complicated, and a crew that shows up to a prepared house gets more done in a day. If you're not sure whether something needs to be moved, ask when we schedule and we'll tell you.