This is the programme for a three-bedroom repaint, written out before you agree to it: which rooms you lose on which day, who is standing in them, what you move and what we move, and the three things that make the dates slip. Most painting websites show you the finished room. This one shows you the fortnight in between.
Section 01 is the whole job as eleven dated days, with the state of the house written against each one rather than the state of the work. It is the part you are actually buying.
Section 02 has the three people who will be in the house, by name, with the one to ring. You met one of us at the quote. It should not be a surprise who the other two are.
This is the programme we would hand you with the quote, for the job we quoted: three bedrooms, hall, living and dining, ceilings, walls, doors and frames, while you carry on living there. Start on a Monday and you are back to normal by the second Friday afternoon. The marked lines are the days a room is genuinely unusable — not tidy, not dusty, unusable.
Floors, fittings, light switches, the piano if there is one. Furniture comes to the middle of each room and gets wrapped. Nothing is painted today and nothing needs to be.
You will want to be home for the first hour so that we can agree what is staying, what is going in the garage, and which room is not being touched at all.
The loudest day of the eleven and the dustiest. Doors are shut and taped, but a house being sanded is a house being sanded.
Quiet day, and the first day the house smells of paint. Windows stay open in those two rooms until we leave.
Second coats, then doors and frames, then we put those two rooms back together before we leave. If the children are sleeping in them that night, say so on day one and we will work to that rather than to the programme.
The second loud day. The hall is the awkward one, because everybody has to walk through it and there is nowhere else for it to go.
The hall is walk-through only from here until Wednesday. Nothing gets carried down it — not a wardrobe, not a washing basket, not a bike.
Your own bed is back in your own room by the time we go. That is the halfway point of the job and it is the day most people stop dreading the rest of it.
This is the hard day and we would rather you had it written down a fortnight in advance than discovered it on the morning. The sofa, the table, the television and the bookshelves all come out. Loud from eight until three.
Most families eat somewhere else on days eight, nine and ten. Some go away for them. Either is sensible and neither changes the price.
Quiet, and the strongest day for smell in the whole job because it is the biggest ceiling in the house.
The last full day with furniture out. Everything that is going back goes back on Monday morning, not tonight, because it is the one part of this job that should not be done in a hurry at four o'clock on a Friday.
Covers up, furniture back where it was, fittings back on, floors done. Then the two of us walk every room while you write down anything you are not happy with, and we fix that list before the invoice is sent rather than after.
Normal by about three. Leftover paint is labelled by room and left in the garage; it is yours.
Because the house is occupied. An empty house is a shorter job and a cheaper one, and if yours is empty — between tenants, before you move in, after a settlement — say so when you ring, because the programme above is not the one you want and you should not be paying for it.
Outside work is not on this programme at all. It runs to the weather rather than to a calendar and we quote it separately, which is the honest way round even though it makes the quote look like two quotes.
A quote is given by whoever answered the phone and the work is done by whoever is free that fortnight. That is normal in this trade and it is the single most common thing people are unhappy about afterwards, so here is the crew, by name, before you decide anything.
The one who came and measured, and the one you ring. On site for the first morning, the last afternoon, and roughly half the days in between.
If you want something changed, tell Tom rather than whoever is nearest. It stops two people getting two different answers.
On site all eleven days and the one running them. Wiremu decides the order things happen in and will tell you at the time if something behind a skirting board changes the plan.
Second painter, in from the first preparation day to the last coat. Not on site on days one and eleven, which are moving days and only need two people.
Nobody else comes into the house. No subcontractors on a job this size, no apprentice you have not been told about, and no fourth person turning up on a Tuesday. If that ever has to change — somebody sick, somebody away — you get the name the day before, not on the morning.
The quote for the job described in section 01. Yours will be a different number, because it is a different house — but it will be set out exactly like this one, on one page, with the exclusions above the signature rather than below it.
We stop, photograph it, and you get a number before anybody carries on. You can say no, and if you do we work around it and it does not appear anywhere on the final invoice.
What will never happen is finding out about it at the end. A variation you were not told about is not a variation, it is a surprise, and we would rather lose the extra work than hand you one.
Got a call on day six about rot under a window sill, with a photo, and a price to leave it or fix it. Said leave it. It was left, and it was not on the bill.Sample text — not a real review. Written by Skyward to show the placement.
A programme that never moves is a programme somebody has made up. These are the three things that actually move ours, roughly in the order they happen, and the rule underneath them is the same in every case: you hear on the day, not at the end.
A sill that has gone, a patch of ceiling that has been wet, wallpaper under the paint. It is the most common reason and it usually costs half a day. You get the photograph and the number the same morning, and the choice of whether it happens at all — see section 03.
It happens, and when it does we ring you before we ring anybody else, because a start date that slips by three days is a different thing to you than to us. We do not start yours a day late and hope the end still lands on the Friday.
Three people, eleven days. If one of us is out, the programme stretches rather than a stranger being put in the house to keep it on schedule. You will be told which, and by how much, that morning.
Take on a second job in the same fortnight to fill a gap. Once the dates are yours they are yours, and a crew that disappears for two days in the middle of your house is the complaint underneath most of the bad reviews in this trade.
| Monday | 8am – 3.30pm |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 8am – 3.30pm |
| Wednesday | 8am – 3.30pm |
| Thursday | 8am – 3.30pm |
| Friday | 8am – 3.30pm |
| Saturday | Not on site |
| Sunday | Not on site |
We come and look, measure, and send one page: the programme, the number with the GST already in it, and what is not in the number. No deposit is asked for at that point and there is nothing to sign.
Faster: ring 09 555 0192. Tom answers it himself and can usually say within a minute whether the fortnight you are hoping for is free.
On a real build this form emails the painter and copies a phone. On this page it does neither — nothing typed into it is sent or stored anywhere, because Bracken does not exist.