Painting contractors who skip measuring and rely on experience instead lose money through inaccurate bids and missed details. A conference story shows how a simple commercial room can hide enough complexity to blow your estimate. Measure everything with a tape or laser.
Chapters
actually measuring out each surface that you need to account for on the painting project that you have.
One of the objections we hear sometimes is that it takes time to do that, and that's legit. It does take time to get out a tape measure or one of those fancy lasers that tell you how far the— or how big the room is. Sometimes it's tempting to be like, well, hey, you know, I've been doing this for a long time, I can walk into a room and I can tell you how long it's going to take my guys to paint this. And I would never pretend to be able to do that. I would struggle with a tape measure, to be honest with you. I remember when I was at PCA this last February, one of the presenters was talking about that And so I'm in a room full of experienced painters and he says, so we're sitting in this conference room, fairly simple. It's a commercial room, nothing too, too fancy. And he says, who wants to take a stab at bidding out this room? A couple of the braver painters, you know, raised their hand and he said, all right, so how many hours? How much to paint this room? And then immediately he starts shooting holes in his estimate. Did you take into account the chair rail? What about this wall over here? Point was a simple conference room isn't so simple. If we don't take the time to, you know, measure it all out and get it right, then it could take us a lot more hours than we had budgeted for. And that is going to directly eat in our margins and we might even lose money on the job.
