Painting a house you are still living in

There are two kinds of painting that look the same from outside and are not. On a new build, the house belongs to the trades. Nobody lives there, nothing is precious yet, and the schedule belongs to the builder.

A repaint is the opposite. The house belongs to a family who are still in it. People need to get to the kitchen. The dog still needs to go out. Somebody is on a call in the next room. Almost every complaint homeowners have about painters comes from this gap, and almost none of it is about how well anybody can paint.

What good protection actually looks like

Nothing should open until the room is protected. That means floors covered properly rather than a drop sheet thrown roughly over the middle, furniture moved out or moved in and wrapped, trim and glass masked, and edges taped before the first can comes open.

It is worth knowing that this is the part customers actually remember. Our reviews mention the taping and the tarping more often than they mention the paint, which tells you how routinely it gets skipped by somebody else. One customer described it as treating your house like it is their own. That is roughly the standard, and it is a low bar that a surprising number of jobs fail.

Ask specifically about dust. Sanding is part of preparation and it generates fine dust that will travel through a house on the air conditioning if nobody contains it. The answer you want involves containment and cleaning up as they go, not a promise to hoover at the end.

The cut line, and why it takes longer

Where the wall meets the ceiling, where the wall meets the trim, where two colours meet in an inside corner: that line is cut in by hand from a ladder. It is slower than masking everything and spraying.

It is also the single thing your eye will return to for the next ten years, usually without knowing that is what it is looking at. A room with a wavering cut line reads as painted. A room with a clean one reads as finished. Nothing else in the job carries that much weight for that little visible effort.

What to expect day to day

• A crew that arrives when they said, which matters more in an occupied house than anywhere else, because you have arranged your day around it.
• Hardware taken off and kept in labelled order so it goes back where it came from, rather than into one bucket.
• Rooms handed back usable each evening where that is possible, instead of the whole house being a site for a fortnight.
• An actual clean up. Not a broom through the middle.

One practical thing you can do at your end: decide in advance where you want furniture to live during the work, and say so. A crew guessing about your dining table is a crew moving it twice.

Colour, and the South Florida problem

Light here is harsher and bluer than the light in any showroom, and it moves a long way between morning and late afternoon. A colour chosen from a small card under store lighting regularly turns into something else on the wall, and the ones that shift most are the near-neutrals people choose to be safe.

The fix is unglamorous. Put the colour on the actual wall, in a patch big enough to read, and look at it in the morning and again with the lamps on before committing. Anyone who discourages you from doing that is optimising for their schedule rather than your next decade.

Questions worth asking before you book

• Who is actually on site, and will anyone from management be there? On our jobs upper management is on site daily, which is why customers end up naming individual people in their reviews.
• How is dust from sanding contained?
• What happens to my furniture and my hardware?
• When can you start? For us, work usually begins two weeks after a proposal is accepted, unless the job carries something unusual.
• Are you licensed and insured? Ours is Florida license U-17482, and you are entitled to ask anyone for theirs.

If you are weighing up a repaint in Boca Raton or anywhere across Palm Beach and Broward, call us on (954) 857-3213. We have been working in occupied houses here since 1990, and most of the discipline above exists because of something that went wrong on somebody's job a long time ago.