When is the best time to paint my house?

Homeowners in the Rochester, NY. area often ask when the best time to paint their home is. This question gets asked primarily for exterior painting. The answer is two-fold, there is the best time to paint based on climate and weather and then there is the best time to paint based on your lifestyle. Luckily these two time periods often have a lot of overlap.

You aren’t going to paint when it’s raining or it’s too cold to paint but that leaves plenty of time every year. Everyone gets this, if you have to try and paint around an icicle it’s clearly not “painting season” regardless of where you live.

So, when do painting companies in the area experience the most demand? The most popular times per year tend to be in the spring before school gets out, in late summer or early fall once school starts again, and for interiors, there is a rush right before the holidays.

Painting around your lifestyle…

Those are the big three times based on lifestyle for the most part. For homeowners with school-aged kids, they tend to want the exterior painting done when the weather is good but the kids won’t interfere or be affected by the work going on outside the house.

Once school is out people generally don’t want their lives to feel on hold in any way so they can plan and also keep their options open without being tied to a major project in the works.

For homeowners with an empty nest, in most cases, any time the weather is warm and dry enough is an option. From a painting contractor’s perspective, this is the steady painting season work time with the crunch being driven by homeowners with school-age children.

Knowing this, if you are a homeowner that has children it’s important that you book a painter early to gain the most scheduling flexibility. While many painting contractors like CertaPro of West Rochester have multiple crews and the ability to schedule jobs at the same time, smaller contractors will likely lack that flexibility. In either case, schedules fill up and as they do your options naturally will narrow.

For the homeowners not working around school schedules you will still benefit from early planning. Waiting till mid-week to get estimates for a job you want to be started the following Monday is taking a risk. While many contractors may be able to fit you in on short notice, especially if they are well organized and have excess painting capacity, you still want to avoid being forced to go with a contractor whose only appeal is that they have nothing booked on the exact dates you want your house painted.

Remember you are always a bit at the mercy of mother nature and a few days of rain is going to cause a ripple effect in anyone’s schedule, call it an occupational hazard, but it certainly happens often enough to factor it into your planning.

So, what’s a safe amount of lead time between when you would like your house painted and when you should get an estimate? A safe number outside of the two crunch times mentioned might be to get an estimate 3-4 weeks in advance of a 7-10 day window inside of which you would like to have your house painted. That may seem like a lot, but it gives you time to review an estimate, schedule your personal life, move things away from your house (you may need to get some shrubs trimmed if they are touching the house), and also leave room for weather-related delays.

Now as for Mother Nature…

Above all other considerations, the temperature of the outside affects the performance of the paint as it adheres to your home’s exterior. Having the temperature within the performance range of the paint and also having things be dry enough to allow the paint to dry within its drying time range is critical.

The most important thing to avoid is rain and extremely high humidity. Getting three days in a row of predictably warm enough and dry enough weather is what makes spring and late summer the ideal times. The middle of summer is fine as well in our area. Humidity itself isn’t a problem until it impacts the surface of the material being painted by causing it to become damp, wood exteriors are more likely to retain moisture than the vinyl siding you would like painted.

Generally speaking, paint is simply going to adhere better to a very dry surface that isn’t too hot or too cold.

When temperatures are consistently above 45 degrees outside during the day and not below freezing at any time you are safe to paint your exterior. There are paints specially formulated to work in different temperature ranges but it’s simply a safe bet to never push the work into a temperature extreme.

What about interior painting?

Here is the good news, since your home is a climate-controlled environment with the ability to control ventilation and temperature, just about any time of the year is a good time from a weather standpoint. From a lifestyle perspective, the only crunch time is around the holidays.

In the fall it’s a good idea to book interior paint painting projects following almost the same basic guidelines as exterior painting. Allow yourself a few weeks before you would like the actual work done to avoid a scheduling crunch. Many exterior painters also paint interiors and with a company like CertaPro of West Rochester, it’s not uncommon that we are painting inside and outside at the same time of year. We also tend to have painters who are specialized in or prefer, one type of painting over the other and that’s to your advantage. You can always ask each company you receive an estimate from to sort out the ones that have the skills and staff to do both types of painting well from the ones who primarily are switching to painting inside simply because the weather isn’t appropriate for painting outside due to climate.

So now that you know when the best time to paint is for both your climate and your lifestyle feel free to request a free estimate for your next painting project. By planning ahead you will be giving yourself a more stress-free experience and giving us a chance to do our very best to make your home look great again!