Paint Results
We spent a total of $924.97 for painting the house over the three day weekend. That is $324.97 OVER budget. On one hand I’m very disappointed and upset that we went that far over – but we were $60 under for our paint support costs (paying someone to help plus food bought for him and us), so overall we were $264 over budget.
We spent $240 on paint support costs – $150 to our friend, and $90 on lunches and beer. That’s very cheap labor I know. I am happy he was able to help and I have to say also happy the other guy had to back out.
We spent $760 at Lowe’s – and also had refunds which is why our total is $75 cheaper – which was much more then I thought we would have to. But we have a large home (2600 square feet) and the paint that was on the walls was the original new construction home paint – basically the worst paint ever. It’s flat and not washable at all, it would have been better if it were primer. At least with primer the paint would have gone on with one coat, we had to do two coats. The paint just soaked up our new paint. I assume that primer would have been cheaper then two coats but we didn’t think it would soak up like it did.
We purchased a total of 16 gallons of paint – 2 5-gallon buckets of the main color, 2 gallons for the accent walls downstairs (it’s easier to paint two walls over then it is to repaint the entire rooms – thinking ahead to selling), 2 gallons for each of the kids rooms (4 gallons total). The 5-gallon buckets do have a total of $40 rebates I am mailing in and I am going to keep close track to make sure we get the money back.
The paint supplies ranged from a new ladder (not in the original budget but needed for this job plus in general for things around the house), rollers, brushes, an extension roller and more. We did take back a few items (the refunds) that I realized we just didn’t need. The ladder cost $100 – I did look at a pawn shop for a ladder but for some reason they were close to the cost of a new one, the cheapest I found was only $12 cheaper then new.
I did use between 1/4 and 1/2 of a tank of gas running into town every day, I’ll have to figure out what that cost as well.
We painted every room in the house except our master bedroom, the 2 1/2 bathrooms and the other bedroom (used as an office/craft room). This weekend we will paint two of the bathrooms the main color – we still have around between 2 and 3 gallons of paint left in that color. Then all we’ll have to worry about is the bedrooms. The office/craft room was used for a mini storage of items in the loft so there was no way we could get to it over the weekend, there was too much to move in there. The bedroom didn’t get painted just because I didn’t want the main color also in there.
We paid less then $1000 to paint the house – had we hired someone we would have probably paid around $4000 (what friends with a similiar sized house paid). I am very glad we did it ourselves and with a friend. We got it done in a short amount of time, the colors are great, the house looks new and shiny. It’s a great feeling to have done all of this on our own! I’ve been working on completing a room at a time putting it back together. We had two stacks of pictures and artwork that was not hung up – I’m putting that all up now. The house overall looks awesome.
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