We paint flats, houses and rental apartments on the Costa del Sol and across the rest of the province. This page is for anyone about to call a painter: what your home needs before the paint, the order in which a home is worked on, and what is worth deciding before anyone turns up, so that the quote you are given is one you can actually read.
Two flats of the same size can be two very different jobs, and the difference lies in the walls, not the square metres. Almost all of them fall into one of these four cases, and many mix several, depending on the room.
The most straightforward case
First you have to decide what to do with it
Emulsion will not cover them
The thing that comes back every winter
If your home is one of those with gotelé, start with gotelé and skimming: what you do with it decides everything that comes after.
Painting a home follows an order, and skipping it shows in the finish. It is the same in a one-bedroom apartment as in a two-storey house.
The floor covered from wall to wall and taped at the edges, the furniture grouped away from the walls and well covered, and the socket and switch plates off. Masking tape on the frames and skirting boards is what decides whether the cut-in lines come out straight.
They are opened up, filled, sanded flush and given a coat of primer. A patch without primer absorbs differently from the wall around it and, when the light comes in from the side, shows through the colour as a dull patch.
The ceiling goes before the walls because whatever splashes falls downwards. And on each surface, first the brushwork in the corners and junctions, then the roller, which covers the edge of the cut-in with the same texture as the rest.
The second coat evens out the colour and sheen that the first one leaves patchy. Then come the doors and frames if they are part of the job; the tape is pulled off while the paint is still soft so that it does not tear the edge, and everything is cleaned.
In a lived-in home that order is repeated room by room: one is finished and handed back before the next one is opened up.
An empty flat, between tenants or before you move in, is painted faster and more cleanly: all the rooms are worked on at once, and the drying time in one is put to use in another. With people living in it the work goes room by room, and you have to allow for one room being out of use at a time.
The window is when there are no guests, and on the coast that nearly always falls outside the summer. It is worth booking it well in advance and not cutting it fine before the first booking: the paint has to dry and the home has to air out before anyone arrives.
Walls and ceilings, almost always. Doors, frames, radiators or window grilles, it depends: they take a different paint and work at a different pace. And the colours: all white is not the same job as a different shade in every room. Make sure the quote sets it out room by room.
It depends on the square metres, the state of the walls and whether it is empty or lived in, and it is set above all by the drying time between coats, which cannot be rushed. That is why we do not give it off the cuff: the timescale goes in writing in the quote, with the stages for your home.
If the old paint is sound and the new colour is similar, usually not. You do need one over patches and freshly skimmed walls, over stains that bleed through, and when going from a strong colour to a light one, because it saves coats and leaves the shade even.
Yes, but they are a separate job: they take enamel rather than the emulsion used on the walls, they need sanding first and they have their own drying time. If you want them included, have the quote list them separately, piece by piece, so you know what you are paying for each one.
One that stands up to steam and can be scrubbed, and in the bathroom one with anti-mould protection. On the coast, with moisture in the air for much of the year, it is the difference between repainting the bathroom often and never having to think about it again.
Yes. The question is where it stops: if the colour is the same as before, new and old do not always match, and the difference shows where they meet. It is best for the break to fall on an edge, such as a corner or the side of a door frame, not in the middle of a wall.
How many rooms there are, whether it is empty or lived in, and a photo of the walls in the worst state. With that we know which of the four cases is yours, and the price and the date reach you in writing.
