A whole-home repaint in Cambridge
This project covered a two-storey, roughly 2,600 sq ft home in Galt, one of Cambridge's older neighbourhoods with a lot of plaster-and-lath walls built well before drywall became standard. The scope was a full interior repaint: every wall, ceiling, and piece of trim in the house, plus the doors, an accent feature wall in the family room, and a full cabinet refinish in the kitchen. Nothing in the house was skipped, which is unusual, most repaints we do land on two or three rooms.
We used a washable eggshell on the walls throughout, flat on the ceilings, and semi-gloss on trim and doors for durability against scuffs. The kitchen cabinets were sprayed rather than brushed, using a hybrid enamel that levels out brush marks and cures hard enough to handle daily use, finished in a warm off-white with the original hardware swapped for black pulls. The family room feature wall went in a deep charcoal to anchor the room against the lighter walls around it.
The plaster walls in the dining room turned out to have years of nicotine staining under the existing paint from a previous owner, which showed through our first coat of primer as a yellow-brown bleed by the next morning. Standard primer was not going to hold it back. We stripped back, sanded, and switched to a shellac-based stain-blocking primer on that room specifically, which added a day to the schedule but sealed it completely, no bleed-through in the finish coats.
Prep took longer than the painting itself in a couple of rooms. Fifteen years of picture hooks, a chunk of drywall behind a wall-mounted TV bracket, and hairline cracks along most ceiling-wall joints needed patching, sanding, and caulking before a drop of paint went on. We also removed and rehung two interior doors that had been rubbing on the frame for years, planing them down while they were off their hinges anyway. None of that is glamorous work but it is the difference between a two-year paint job and a ten-year one.
Start to finish, including the extra drying day for the cabinet spray finish (each coat needs about 24 hours before the next goes on), the job ran just over two and a half weeks. Cost landed in the $17,000 to $19,000 range for a job this size, in line with our per-room painting pricing once you add up 12 rooms of walls and ceilings plus the cabinet refinish, which is priced separately from wall painting. No permits are required for interior painting work.