So I recently had to get two painting bids. One for a 640 sq foot one bedroom apartment we were turning over, and one for the exterior of our 1750 sq foot duplex.
I got what I found to be a totally insane bid for the interior one bedroom apartment. Painting company wanted $2000. When I had my husband call them back to point out this was significantly higher than we anticipated, and was way more than an entire months rent on the unit, they offered to come down a hundred dollars. Nope. We had our handy man do the job instead. They genuinely seemed surprised we said no.
Fast forward a few weeks and we had a second set of painters that my realtor recommended come over to give the estimate on the exterior job for the duplex. It's a 1750 sq foot single family house that was legally split ten years ago. So think basic, one story stucco box with wood trim. Granted, the two decks are wood, 6 of the windows are wood , there is a carport and the wood is not in great shape, but we also told them we wanted to do basic repair and use compound to fix the issues, not do a full restore. We're not exactly in the fanciest neighborhood. The quote?
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---$25,000. Did you fall out of your chair? I actually laughed when I opened the bid. Then I studied it. It was nearly $7k just to paint the stucco, and $14+k for the trim. I think we could probably rebuild both porches and replace the trim for cheaper.
I asked a couple of friends and coworkers. They all couldn't believe it. I thought, hey, maybe they messed up the decimal point. Maybe the trim was only $1.4k and they typed $14k. That seemed kind of rude to ask, so I couched in my response that I was concerned there was a typo.
A day later the email came back. Nope, 25k was totally accurate. They could maybe come down a few hundred or even a thousand dollars. I told them I would pass.
In my area (Coastal So Cal) the estimate I was expecting (and that I have had verified from others who recently had similarly sized homes painted) was between $8-10k, maybe $10-$14k depending on which company I went with and how fancy a job they wanted to do. Keep in mind this is for a one story stucco house that with a crew of three to four guys should take them a week to knock out, and the high demand spring/summer painting season is over.
The last time I saw this kind of crazy was in the lead up to the housing bubble crash. I think the contractors are just busy and demanding a premium. We decided to sit on our cash and wait until spring. I will no longer be pregnant, though I really don't want to do the job ourselves, and we may have the handy man do some of the minor repairs and painting of the windows to extend the life of the current job. Assuming the Trump tax plan goes as well as all his other attempts at Congressional legislation, the talk of bubbles in real estate, rentals, tech stocks, the market, even zinc, as well as the fact that there is some major uncertainty around North Korea, European politics etc. we're ok waiting to see how things shake out.
In the mean time I've told my husband to stop joking that he will go work at Starbucks as a back up career if things go to shit--after all, apparently he can make a killing as a painter in this town.