An older house that had been sitting empty, painted purple and green wall to wall. Here is the prep it took and what every room looks like now. Tap any photo to see it full size.
The house had been empty long enough that the spiders had claimed it, and that is not a figure of speech. Webs in the corners of every room, in the light fixtures, across the stair rail. On top of that, whoever lived there last had gone all in on color. Deep purple running up the stairwell, kelly green through the upstairs hall, green again in both bedrooms and the bathroom. The living room wall had failed down to the paper and was coming away in sheets.
Plenty of contractors would have looked at it and passed. We took it, partly because the owner needed somebody who would, and partly because nothing wrong with the house was structural. It was filthy and it was dark. Both of those have a fix.
Very little of the time on this job went into rolling paint. It went into what happened before that.
Every surface got cleaned first, which on a house closed up this long is not a pass with a rag. The living room wall was cut back to sound material, patched, and sanded flat. The rest of the walls were sanded and spot corrected wherever the old finish had chipped or the drywall had taken a hit. Then the existing painted surfaces were prepped so the new coat had something to grip, which matters more than people expect on a wall that has already been painted over two or three times.
After that, the coats. Going from a saturated purple to white is not a one coat job, and anybody who tells you it is will hand you a wall that looks fine at night and blotchy at ten in the morning. We kept building until the old color was gone in daylight.
All of it is Sherwin-Williams White Snow, SW 9541. Walls, ceilings, trim and doors, the same white through the whole interior.
That was on purpose. In a house with rooms this size, running one white everywhere stops the hallway from reading as a different temperature than the bedroom it opens into. You notice it most on the stairs. The purple used to stop your eye halfway up, so the second floor felt like somewhere else in the building. Now the stairwell reads as part of the same house.
If you want to see what a few other whites and colors do to a room before you commit to one, there is a color visualizer on our painting page.
Nothing moved. The vanity, the tile, the carpet, the ceiling fans, the blinds and the flooring are all the same ones in the before photos. No wall came down, no cabinet came out, no fixture got swapped. The only thing that changed is what is on the walls.
That is worth sitting with if you own an older house and you are running numbers on a remodel. Paint is the cheapest square footage in the building. With honest prep behind it, a repaint gets you most of the way to the house you were picturing, and it leaves the budget for the things paint genuinely cannot fix.
We take on interior painting across the Nashville metro out of our shop in Murfreesboro, Antioch and the rest of Davidson County included. If your house is in the shape this one was, that is not a reason to put it off.
Related reading: what interior painting actually costs in Middle Tennessee and what a rental turnover takes, start to finish.
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