Cheap Paint is Expensive!

What is the diffrence in the total cost of your project if you use the cheap line of paint vs. the premium line for the exterior of your home? It might seem crazy at first, but cost per gallon is a small part of the equation.

First off, I'm going to assume that you are using Benjamin Moore. If you're not . . . well, you should be.

Let's start with the products. We'll compare two grades in order to keep things simple:

Premium grade: Aura @ $65.99 Per gallon vs
Typical grade:   Ben   @ $39.99 Per gallon   =  A $26.00 per gallon difference.

Now we must consider the type of surface you are painting and the appropriate primer. These usually range from about $28.00 to $50.00 depending on what you're doing. Since Aura is "self priming" on most surfaces ,we have negated the $26.00 per gallon difference-- therefore your cost per square foot has dropped.

If your exterior paint job was 3,000 square feet for the body of the house, with 800 square feet of trim, soffits, and facia, you would need a total of:

2 coats of paint: 17 gallons of Aura @ 65.99 = 1,121.83
VS
1 primer and 2 coats of paint: 19 gallons of Ben (because it doesn't cover as many Sq ft) @ $39.99 + 9 gallons of primer @ $28.00 = $1011.81

A difference of  $110.02 . . . HOWEVER, we have not even talked about the time and labor involved in the extra coat of primer, OR taken into account that the Aura will have better color and sheen retention, OR that it will last longer.
By the time you consider all the factors, you will save a lot!

Figure your time at a reasonable hourly rate... say $15.00 per hour. Then try to estimate how long it will take you to prime the entire house. If you have hired a painter to do the work you should estimate somewhere around $35.00 per hour.

Next try to figure how much it is worth "TO YOU" that your paint job will be looking like new for many more years if you use the premium stuff. Once you have assigned a value to these points, it will become abundantly clear which grade of paint is the best choice!

Even if you thought about being clever and trying one of those "Big Box-paint and primer in one" options just remember. Benjamin Moore's "Ben" outperforms those options and there are no two ways about it. When it comes to the quality of your paint, you get exactly what you pay for.

Another way to look at this: The average paint job for an exterior ranges from $4,000 to $10,000 depending on the amount of prep work (scraping, sanding, grinding, etc) needed before the paint is applied. So even if you left primer out of the equation, the cost difference is still quite negligible, leaving the increase somewhere between 1.5% and 3.5%.

Brushing Fast With Benjamin Moore's Aura

We recently painted this stucco house in Missoula's slant street neighborhood: 

I was trying to make good time and get the job done, so I found myself brushing out this garage door pretty quickly.

At the paint store earlier in the day, I spent about 15 minutes trying to help a fellow painter use Benjamin Moore's Aura Exterior Paint. She didn't get it (this was my second attempt to help her understand what slight modifications you have to do to effectively use Aura like any other paint).We even showed her our video on how to use it, but she insisted that the paint is no good, that you can't just apply it like you would any other paint.

So, being as we use this paint at every job we do and have never had any trouble applying it, I decided to grab our camera from the car and video a couple minutes of trouble-free brushing. And me showing off.

The paint is Benjamin Moore's Bittersweet Chocolate in Aura Low Lustre.

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From Dog Room to Baby Room 2

So I got all fired up last night and applied the first coat of Bittersweet Chocolate to the walls of the transforming Dog Room. Even though the pictures don't do the color justice, you can pretty easily see how well Aura covered in one coat.

Justin brushing a straight line without tape.

I always move too fast when someone is trying to capture me painting. You can see how I first went around the room, brushing in the edges. You should brush about a brush-width, which is enough for a roller to get close to corners but not hit the ceiling.

This is especially important if you aren't painting the ceiling (I have zero room for error when touching the ceiling since I don't have touch-up paint for it).

Justin with brush in hand.

I always feel like such a cheeseball when posing for pictures, but I guess you might as well see me on site. Note that I painted the edges of the walls surrounding the window and ceiling and left the rest for the roller to tackle. I could have brushed it since it's such a small area, but rolling goes a lot faster.

Wow, my hair sure looks sharp and pointy tonight! Just for the record,
 that's not my goal. I need a haircut.

Again, I brushed in all the edges of the walls then rolled the big spaces.

I didn't get any pictures of me rolling, but we'll leave that for a video or 2 later on.



This is one coat of Aura--it still needs the second application to be perfect, but this is one hallmark of a great quality paint.



It is now well on its way to becoming a different sort of place.I still need to finish up the second coat and the trim. Then we can move in the the baby stuff.

















Note that I a didn't use a roller tray. Instead, I am used a 5 gallon bucket with a roller grid, as well as a 2 foot Wooster roller pole.

The professional roller setup.

In future posts, including in videos, I will demonstrate the benefits of using this sort of roller setup and not the roller tray (at least for most projects, anyway).

These shots are so blown out that I am a bit embarrassed to post them, but it's so bright and snowy outside today that it just blasts through the blinds. I guess I should use my good camera and not my phone.
The Droid camera is only so good despite what they say.

Okay, this picture is ultra dark, but short of setting up some lights or waiting for the sun to go away, I haven't been able to get better pics off the painted walls so far.





Still, look how well it covered!

We're thinking about putting up a vinyl wall decal of a tree of some sort, although we need to decide where we will put the big dresser so we know which wall(s) to do it on.

























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From Dog Room to Baby Room

Since we are expecting our first kid in February, it's about time that I started getting the baby's room ready. In our case, we are converting the Dog Room over to what my wife likes to call the Nursery. I prefer to call it the Kid Room (it seems more fun that way, and somehow calling it a nursery makes me feel like we should also have a study, a butler's staircase, and a parlor).

Note the large sample color areas I brushed out.

The room was a sort of bland yellow in its time as the Dog Room, and since my wife and I both like to go bold with color, we decided to paint the walls a very dark brown. We first tried the above color, a custom brown that we decided was too light and too grey-ish, especially since we are going to decorate the room in a sort of "Where the Wild Things Are," monsters, faeries, and mystical forests theme and we wanted a dark background to set the stage for the kid's imagination to go wild (hopefully in a fun, good way!).

My Great Dane Clyde standing in the
Dog Room before its transformation into the Kid Room

We decided to test out a darker brown and went with Bittersweet Chocolate, 2114-10, from Benjamin Moore's Pottery Barn Fall 2010 Color Selection. It's a pretty dark brown (about as dark as it gets while still being brown), and we like it for this room since we don't know whether or not our kid is going to be a boy or a girl.

Also, we want to light the room up with funky lighting, so we chose an eggshell sheen in Benjamin Moore's Aura. Most people think that if you use such a dark color, your room will end up ultra dark. Well, it will, but actually, if you add a little sheen (like the eggshell or even satin) and light it properly, the room won't feel like a cave.

Of course if you decide to paint a room ultra dark brown, you better not be afraid of a little color! It's easy for me to just re-paint something if I don't like it.

Still, just sample your colors on your walls to make sure you like them--you can save a lot of excess work and money on paint you don't like by sampling.

At this point, I sampled the 2 colors all over the room, something most people don't do enough when selecting color. Put out a little money, buy a few samples, then put them on the wall. Just make sure you apply it smoothly and don't leave any runs or heavy edges since you will see them in the finished project.

Note that I painted a large area in order to sample each color.
You don't need to do such big swaths, but bigger can be better,
especially with a major color change like this.

I have had customers who worry that if they go dark or bold (say with a bright orange or red) that they will have problems later on when they want to change colors.

I don't worry about that at all, especially since we only use ultra high quality materials. 99% of the time we use Benjamin Moore's Aura, which has excellent hiding properties and will  usually cover just about any color in 2 coats. In fact, we usually get about 95% coverage in the first coat.

The 2 browns here are each just single coats of Aura.

In another post I will discuss using only  premium quality paint for your jobs, but for now, just trust me. Better paint will save you time and give you better results.

And in this case, since it is a Kid Room, we also want to use environmentally friendly paint like Aura since we don't want to expose either my wife or the baby to hazardous VOC's and other nasty stuff.

In this picture you can see how grey-ish the first brown looked, even though on the chip it appeared to be very dark.

The Bittersweet Chocolate will provide a better backdrop for either blue or pink accents.

In this room, we are not going to paint the ceiling (I'm being lazy). I'm going to just leave it white since it's in good shape and doesn't need a new coat of paint. On that note, I think keeping a light ceiling is almost necessary when you go with such a dark color in a bedroom. You might be able to get away with a dark ceiling in a larger room with a high ceiling, but in an average bedroom, I suggest keeping the ceiling light.


I will actually start painting the room tomorrow and will return here to show you a little bit of the process as well as some of the tools we use. If you come up with questions, please ask since that's why I am here.