Apartment Turnover Painting

A Turn Is a Schedule Problem That Happens to Involve Paint

Anyone can roll a wall in an empty apartment. The reason turnover painting is its own service is that the painting is one lane in a queue, and the queue has a hard end date. Keys come back on a Friday. The listing wants photos on a Thursday. In between, a cleaner, possibly a flooring crew, possibly a plumber, and us.

We build the job backwards from the day you need the unit shown. That tells us which day we can be in, whether we can afford a second coat drying overnight, and whether the enamel on the doors goes on first thing Monday or gets skipped in favor of a wipe down. Those are real trade-offs and we would rather make them with you on the phone than discover them at four in the afternoon on the last day.

Scoping the Unit Honestly

The walkthrough sorts everything in the unit into three piles. Dirt, wear, and damage.

Dirt washes off. The gray band at hand height along a hallway, the film above a stove, the ring around a light switch. That is a rag and a degreaser, not a coat of paint, and paying to paint over it is paying twice because the paint will not stick to it anyway.

Wear is the fading, the small scuffs, the general dullness after a few years of somebody living there. That is a refresh, and it is an owner cost. It is normal and it is what a repaint is for.

Damage is different. Anchors torn out of drywall by a television mount, crayon, an unapproved dark accent wall that now needs sealing and two coats, holes, pet damage at door bottoms. We itemize that separately so you have a clean scope in the file if any of it is going to a deposit conversation.

The Order of Work Inside a Vacant Unit

Wash first. Grease, hairspray, nicotine and kitchen film all defeat adhesion, and a tape line that peels in six months traces back to a wall nobody cleaned.

Then the repairs. Anchors pulled, holes backed and filled properly rather than skimmed, caulk cut out and replaced where it has shrunk away from the trim. Compound goes on in coats and gets sanded flat, because in a vacant unit with no furniture and no curtains the light is brutal and a proud patch shows from the doorway.

Then the sealing, where it is needed. Water stains from an upstairs leak, tannin bleeding through on old trim, marker, smoke. Each of those wants a specific primer and none of them are solved by an extra coat of wall paint.

Then the paint itself, room by room, so completed rooms can be released to whoever is next.

Standardize the Building and Save Real Money

The single largest saving available to an owner with more than a couple of units is boring: pick one wall color, one ceiling white and one trim enamel, and put it in every unit.

Once a building is standardized, a turn stops being a repaint and becomes a touch-up on most walls. A leftover gallon is useful anywhere in the building instead of being unit specific. Nobody has to color match a wall that was painted four years ago and has faded, which is a thing that almost never matches cleanly. We keep the product, color code and sheen for every building we work in, and we will hand you that record whether or not we do the next turn.

Sheen, Because Rentals Get Touched

Rental walls take abuse that owner-occupied walls do not. We use a washable acrylic in eggshell or satin on walls and hallways, because those clean up without burnishing, and flat only on ceilings. Doors, casings and baseboards get an enamel that hardens properly and will take a wipe, which matters at the next turn when somebody wants to clean rather than repaint them.

Two coats on any color change and on anything that was patched. One full coat is honest work where the existing finish is sound and the same color is going back on, and we will tell you which walls qualify rather than charging two coats across a whole unit out of habit.

What We Need From You

An empty unit, power on, and access. If the flooring is being replaced we would rather come before the new floor goes down or after it is protected. If the unit was smoked in, tell us on the phone, because that changes the primer and the day count and it is not a discovery we want to make on site.

Call (562) 923-1905 with the address, the unit type and the move-out date. We will tell you what it is and what it costs.