DIY or Hire a Painter: An Honest Comparison
Plenty of painting is worth doing yourself, and it would be silly for a painting company to pretend otherwise. The useful question is not whether you can, but which jobs reward the effort and which quietly cost more than they save.
Where DIY genuinely wins
A single interior room, at ground level, with sound walls and no ceiling work, is a good DIY job. The materials are a modest cost, the access is safe, the surface preparation is manageable, and if the cut lines are slightly wobbly you are the only person who will ever notice.
The same goes for a fence, a garden shed, an interior door, or refreshing a colour you already have on a wall in good condition. These are forgiving jobs. Take your time, buy decent paint rather than the cheapest, and the result will be fine.
Where the numbers stop working
The comparison people usually make is the cost of paint against the cost of a quote. That leaves out most of the real inputs.
- Equipment. Brushes, rollers, trays, sandpaper, filler, sealant, masking, drop sheets, a sander, and for anything above head height, ladders or a hired platform. On an exterior job this adds up quickly and most of it you use once.
- Scaffolding. For a two-storey house this is the item that changes the arithmetic. Hiring it yourself is a significant cost, and working off ladders at that height is the part of the job most likely to go badly wrong.
- Time. A full exterior repaint is not a long weekend. Washing, drying, scraping, filling, sealing, priming and two finish coats over a whole house is weeks of work for someone doing it occasionally, and it has to fit into dry, still weather.
- Waste. Buying too much or the wrong product, and redoing a wall that did not cover, are ordinary costs of learning on your own house.
The part that is hardest to judge from the ground
Preparation is where a professional repaint earns its money, and it is the part that is easiest to underestimate. Knowing how far to scrape back, when a surface needs a sealer rather than another topcoat, when a crack is cosmetic and when it means water is getting in, and which primer suits which substrate. Get those calls wrong and the paint looks fine for a season and fails early.
Wellington is unforgiving about it. Wind-driven rain, salt on the coastal suburbs and heavy UV find every shortcut. Our note on why exterior paint fails early here covers the usual causes, most of which start with preparation.
Jobs worth handing over
- Anything above single storey. The access cost and the risk both change.
- Roofs. Height, pitch and fragile surfaces, and the coatings are specific to the roof material. See roof painting.
- Homes built before about 1980. Older paint layers may contain lead, and sanding or scraping them creates a genuine health risk that needs proper controls.
- Ceilings and large open-plan interiors. Physically demanding, and lap marks in a big ceiling are permanent and obvious.
- Anything where the finish matters. Gloss joinery and dark feature walls both show every flaw in the preparation.
A middle path
You do not have to choose one or the other. It is common to have the exterior and the ceilings done professionally while you handle the bedrooms yourself, or to do your own preparation on an interior job and have someone else spray the joinery. If you want to split a job that way, say so when you ask for a quote and it can be priced accordingly.
Deciding
Ask yourself three questions. Can I reach all of it safely? Do I know what the preparation actually requires here? Do I have the weather window and the weeks? Two yeses and a maybe usually means go ahead. A no on the first one is the answer.
If you would like a quote to compare against doing it yourself, get in touch. You can also see the full range of painting services we offer.