When you have an investment property, it is very important to spend the extra money to make it look nice so you can keep it rented. An empty house is a negative return on your investment.
I had a tenant move out at the end of last month. I got a call from our property management company last Friday saying they had someone who wanted to move in this Friday! Not bad having a property sit less than a month. The property management company had a list of items that I needed to either pay someone to do or do myself, but fast either way. One of those items was repainting the interior of the house because the last paint job was bleeding through and looked spotty. We got a quote to paint the house. It is not a large property...just 1112 sq ft. They wanted $1950.00 to paint the house. We decided this was far too much to pay and that we would do the work ourselves.
We completely repainted the interior of the house in one and a half days. The "we" was me and a friend. The tools we used were varied. We used old fashioned rollers, a roller that had a reservoir that you pulled the paint into and then painted until it needed refilling, and an airless contractor series paint gun with the roller attachment.
The airless gun worked well, but was heavy and required two people to move from room to room without making a mess. It also took twenty minutes to clean. I like this tool for fast exterior painting when you can afford to have overspray, but it wore me out for interior painting. Still, it gave excellent results. I do recommend cleaning the roller after each room.
The tool with the reservoir worked well and was less cumbersome. Because we bought 5 gallons of paint in one can, it required we have a smaller container to put the paint in to before sucking it into the reservoir. Overall, it worked well.
Then, the old fashioned rollers...they worked well. You had to keep going back to the tray for more paint. They took the least amount of time to clean as you could either rinse the roller to use later, or just throw it away and start with a new roller later.
The first day, we tried to paint room by room. Things were going pretty slowly and we were worried that we might not finish in our allotted timeline of being done that weekend. After two rooms, we realized this was not the most efficient method and we decided a new approach.
We decided that framing each room was the most time consuming part of the job. We both started painting along the ceiling line and around the doors and outlets. We did the rest of the house and called it a day. A very long day...
***Important note! Only frame the rooms that you have enough paint to complete. If you are low on paint, go buy more and start fresh on the next room. Otherwise, you could end up with extra work on your hands when you realize that the paint does not match perfectly.***
The next day, we went back and finished the house in just a few hours. Because we only had to focus on painting the large areas, the painting went much more quickly. After finishing, we left the house for a while we allowed the paint to dry and our eyes to adjust back to seeing normal things. When we went back, we looked for any spots that needed to be touched up and happily found that there were very few to touch up.
So, save yourself some time and make sure that you have the right tools and frame the rooms first.
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