You keep living here while we paint.

What happens before any color goes on

Most of an interior job is preparation, and most of the hours are too. Furniture comes to the middle of the room and gets covered, floors get papered or dropped, and switch plates and vent covers come off into a bag marked for that room. Taking a plate off takes twenty seconds. Cutting a brush around one leaves an edge you notice every time you reach for the light.

Then the walls get read properly. Nail holes, the dent where a chair back has been leaning for nine years, hairline cracking along a drywall seam, and the shiny patch where somebody scrubbed a mark off with a kitchen cleaner. Those get filled, sanded flat and spot primed. Filler drinks paint at a different rate to the wall around it, so an unprimed patch shows up in the finish as a dull shape the moment afternoon light comes across it.

If we are burying a dark color, a strong red, or a stain left by water or smoke, that area gets a full prime instead of a spot. Trying to hide it under extra coats of finish costs more and works worse, and it is why so many do it yourself rooms end up with four coats on them and still look uneven.

• Furniture to the middle and covered, floors protected
• Switch plates and vent covers off and bagged by room
• Holes filled, sanded flat and spot primed
• Two coats, cut in by hand and rolled
• Plates back on and the room put back before we leave

Sheen, picked room by room

Sheen is how much light the dry paint throws back, and it decides more about how a room looks than most people expect. A flat finish hides an uneven wall better than anything else, which is why it belongs on ceilings and on older walls that have been patched a few times. What flat will not do is take a wipe with a cloth without leaving a shiny mark where you rubbed.

Eggshell and satin carry enough sheen to clean, so they go where life happens. A hallway with hands on it, a kid's room, a family room with a dog in it. Bathrooms, laundry rooms and kitchens want something tighter again, because they get steam and splashes and they get wiped often. Trim and doors go a step further so they stay hard and clean up without dulling.

The more sheen you add, the more of the wall you can see, so a high sheen on a wavy old wall shows every wave in it. We walk the rooms with you and say what we would put where, and it goes on the estimate by sheen name rather than being decided later with a roller already loaded.

Ceilings, texture and the cut line

The line where the wall meets the ceiling is the first thing anybody looks at, whether they know they are looking or not. It gets cut in by hand with a brush. Tape helps on a few surfaces and it is useless on textured drywall, where paint creeps under the edge and hands you a worse line than a steady hand would have.

Pinellas ceilings are mostly knockdown, orange peel or old popcorn, and texture drinks paint. A textured ceiling takes more material than a flat one and it wants rolling in one direction across the whole room, or you get lap lines that show up under the fixtures at night. A ceiling also gets done as a whole ceiling. Spot patching one shows in raking light for as long as the house stands.

Trim, baseboard, casing and doors come last so nothing already finished gets knocked or splashed. Doors come off the hinges and get done flat where it makes sense, because a door painted hanging in its frame collects a run along the bottom edge that you feel every time you close it.

Living in the house while we work

Nearly every interior we do has somebody in the house all day. That means one room at a time, a clear path from the front door to the kitchen, and tools packed away in the evening rather than left across a floor somebody has to step over. It is the difference between a week that is mildly annoying and a week that ruins your routine.

One customer wrote that Nick and his crew were professional, neat and courteous, that their cleanup was immaculate, and that they took all their brushes and rollers home with them to clean so there was no mess at her house. That is the standard, and it is a deliberate one.

Interior paint is water based and low odor now, so a room is usually back in use the same day. We still keep air moving and keep the door shut on the room we are in, because low odor is not no smell, and nobody should have to sleep in a bedroom that smells of anything at all.

Drywall, and the repairs a room needs first

A lot of what looks like a painting problem is a repair problem wearing paint. A stain on a ceiling, a hole where a towel bar pulled out, popped nails down a hallway wall, a bad texture job somebody else left behind. Paint over any of it and the room looks finished for about a week.

Drywall repair is ours rather than a subcontractor's, and that changes how a job runs. One customer wrote that a previous contractor had done a really bad texture job on their bathroom ceiling and that Nick's team was able to fix the mistakes and make it look perfect. Another wrote that the repair work was perfect and all three rooms looked amazing.

Filling a hole is the quick part. What takes the time is feathering the compound out wide enough that the light does not catch a ridge, sanding it flat, matching the texture on the rest of the wall, and priming it so it stops drinking. Skip the last step and the patch reads as a dull shape through however many coats go over it.

Color, and the way Florida light reads it

Color behaves differently here. Rooms in Pinellas take a lot of daylight, often bouncing off a white tile floor or in through a screened lanai, and that light is warmer and stronger than the light a paint chip was designed under. A gray that looked soft under a store fixture can read blue on a wall facing a pool deck.

So look at the color in the actual room, on the actual wall, at the time of day you are usually standing in it. Big samples beat small ones by a mile, and a color you glanced at once in the morning is a color you have not really seen.

We can also chase a match for a color you already have. Bring a chip, a lid, or a piece of the wall. A match taken off an old wall is never exact, because the color on that wall has been fading since the day it went on, and we would rather show you how close it is than promise you it is the same.