Why timings matter more than they look
The single most common thing that goes wrong on a decorating job is not the finish. It is the schedule. Someone books a decorator expecting a room to be done in a day, plans their week around it, and then discovers the walls need filling and the woodwork needs two coats with drying time in between.
So here are realistic timings, including the preparation that people tend to forget.
A single room
For an average bedroom or living room with sound walls:
- Day one: protect the floor and furniture, fill, sand, caulk, and spot prime. This is most of the skill in the job and it is not the part you can rush.
- Day two: cut in and roll the first coat on walls and ceiling.
- Day three: second coat, then woodwork, then touch-ups and clean down.
Two to three days is normal. A small box room might be two. A large room with high ceilings, picture rails, panelled doors and a bay window can easily be four or five, because the woodwork is where the hours go.
What makes a room take longer
- Dark to light colour changes. Covering a strong colour with a pale one often takes three coats, not two.
- Damaged or previously papered walls. Stripping paper and making good can add a full day on its own.
- Lots of woodwork. Skirting, architrave, doors, window surrounds and a staircase take far longer than the wall area suggests.
- Drying time. This is not padding. Recoating before the previous coat has cured properly is how you get a soft, patchy finish that marks the first time something touches it.
A whole house
For a typical three-bedroom house being fully redecorated inside, expect somewhere around two to three weeks. Four bedrooms with a hallway, landing and staircase runs longer.
Hallways and staircases are consistently underestimated. They are high, awkward to access, need tower or ladder work, and have a lot of spindles and strings. A staircase alone can take several days to do properly.
Exteriors
Exterior work depends more on the weather than on the house. A typical exterior repaint of masonry and joinery on a semi-detached house takes roughly a week of workable weather, but that can spread across a fortnight if it keeps raining.
Two constraints are worth knowing:
- Most exterior masonry and trim paints need temperatures above roughly 5°C to cure properly.
- Surfaces need to be genuinely dry before coating, not just not currently raining.
This is why we would rather move an exterior job than push on through poor conditions. A coating applied in the wrong weather can fail within a season, and then the whole job has to be done again.
Questions worth asking any decorator
- Is preparation included in that price, or priced separately?
- How many coats is the quote based on?
- What happens if the walls turn out to need replastering?
- Does the timeline include drying time, or just working days?
A decorator who gives you a suspiciously short timeline is usually planning to skip preparation. That is where the cost shows up later.
Getting a realistic quote
We would rather give you a timeline that turns out to be accurate than one that sounds good on the phone. If you want a proper look at your property and an honest schedule, get in touch for a free quote.