Short, practical, and learned the hard way. Each one is something a painter on TheHire has told a customer more than once. Most of it costs nothing.
Before the job
- Find the water first. Walk the flat with the lights off and the windows open and look for patches, powder, bubbles and tide marks. Each one needs a mason or a plumber before a painter. The painter's damp treatment is ₹35 per sq ft and it holds only on a wall that has stopped getting wet.
- Measure the walls yourself. Perimeter times height, plus the ceiling, minus the doors and windows. Roughly three to three and a half times the carpet area. Write it down before the painter arrives; the quote is on this number.
- Choose colours in the room, at the time of day you use it. Paint a 2 by 2 ft test patch from a sample pot, look at it morning and evening, and remember a whole wall reads about one step darker than the card.
- Write the shade codes down. Every tinted colour has a code. Keep it with the leftover tin; a touch-up without it is a guess.
- Book outside the Diwali rush. October is three weeks of full diaries and rising rates. September for an October slot, or January for a calm job at the normal ₹16 per sq ft.
- Empty the shelves and pull everything to the centre. Painters charge for the day; moving a wardrobe is an hour that could have been a wall.
During the job
- See the primer. It is a thin white or grey coat before the colour, or a red coat on metal. If the colour is going straight on to the putty, stop and ask.
- Listen for sandpaper. Between the putty and the primer, and between the coats. A silent job is an unsanded job.
- Insist on sealed tins. An open drum with a faded label may hold a cheaper grade. Count the empties against the bill at the end.
- Give each coat its time. Four to six hours in dry weather, overnight in the monsoon. A painter rolling the second coat an hour after the first is trapping water in the film.
- Go dark to light in three coats. From a deep colour to white, two coats show through. Agree the third up front rather than argue it on the last day.
- Keep the bathroom ceiling special. Anti-fungal primer and a premium emulsion with a fungicide; a plain emulsion ceiling at ₹6 per sq ft is black again by September.
- Check the cutting-in at the ceiling line and around switchboards. It is where a rushed job shows first, and it is easier to fix while the painter is still there.
After the job
- Walk every room in daylight before the last payment. Look along each wall towards the window for roller marks and misses. A bulb hides what the morning sun shows.
- Keep a sealed litre per colour. With the shade code taped to it. Touch-ups for the next five years.
- Let it cure before you scrub. Emulsion is dry in hours and hard in two to four weeks. Wiping a mark in the first week lifts the paint; after a month a damp cloth is fine on a washable grade.
- Hang pictures on hooks, not nails. A nail hole is a putty touch-up; a picture rail or an adhesive hook is nothing.
For people who own the house
- Do the exterior in the dry months. October to February. A waterproof exterior coat at ₹22 per sq ft on a dry wall lasts six to eight years; the same coat on a damp July wall lasts one.
- Prime every grill and gate. The ₹500 per grill and ₹2,500 per gate include a red-oxide primer and two coats of enamel. Half that price is a quote without the primer, and the rust is back within a year.
- Do the terrace before the ceiling. A stain on the top-floor ceiling is the terrace. ₹45 per sq ft on the terrace in the dry season, then, after a rain has proven it dry, the ceiling at ₹6.
Four for the kitchen and the bathroom
- Satin in the kitchen, matte everywhere else. A soft-sheen emulsion wipes clean of oil splashes; matte does not. Full putty first if the wall is uneven, because sheen shows waves.
- Tile the dado, paint above it. The bottom four feet of a bathroom or kitchen wall gets wet; the mason's tiles there and the painter's emulsion above is the arrangement that lasts.
- An exhaust fan that is actually used. Most bathroom mould is a fan that is never switched on. The cheapest paint tip in the house.
- Move the wardrobe an inch off the wall. On an outside wall, the air gap stops the condensation that grows mould behind it every monsoon.
Four for the money
- Do the whole flat in one go. Painters discount from the fourth room, the covering and staging is set up once, and the leftover from one room finishes the next. Two rooms now and two next year costs more and the shades never match.
- Buy the paint yourself if you have the time. A labour-only quote at ₹16 per sq ft plus a dealer's bill is cheaper than an all-in rate, and you get the grade you paid for. Large dealers discount 10 to 15 percent on a full-flat order if you ask.
- Spend the premium on the walls that get touched. Premium emulsion in the hall, the corridor and the children's room, where it will be wiped; standard in the bedrooms; distemper on the ceiling of the store. Same labour everywhere, paint cost where it earns its keep.
- Use the daily rate for odd jobs only. A painter at ₹850 and a helper at ₹600 per day is right for three doors and a balcony wall. For a whole flat, a per sq ft rate is cheaper because nobody is in a hurry on a daily rate.
Related tips you might want next
The bathroom grout, the terrace coba and the plinth are the mason's; the POP cornice and the false ceiling that go in before the paint are their own trade's; and the colour scheme that makes the whole flat work is an interior designer's hour. The guides for those three trades pick up where these tips stop.