Whether you’re refreshing a single room or planning a full exterior overhaul, the success of your painting project isn’t just about the final coat of paint—it’s about the work done before the first brush even touches the wall. Preparation is the bridge between a good project and a great one, ensuring your home is ready for a seamless, high-quality finish.
To help you prepare, we’ve put together a guide on how you can get your home ready for our crew, saving time and ensuring the best possible results.
A Little Groundwork Goes a Long Way
Most homeowners spend a fair amount of time choosing a contractor and picking colors, and then don’t think much about what happens between signing the estimate and day one of the job. A little preparation on the front end saves time, reduces disruption, and keeps the project on track once the crew arrives.
Clear the Room
Preparing your environment correctly not only protects your belongings but also allows our crew to work with the speed and precision required for a high-quality finish. Here is how to best prepare your interior and exterior spaces for our arrival.
Interior Jobs
Painters need to move freely from wall to wall with ladders, trays, and equipment, and a room that looks reasonably clear to a homeowner often isn’t clear enough for a full crew to work efficiently. Start by removing everything you can: lamps, decorative objects, books, framed photos on shelves, anything on low tables or window sills. For furniture that can’t leave the room, your crew will shift it toward the center and cover it with drop cloths, but the less that has to happen on day one, the faster the interior painting actually begins.
Exterior Jobs
Create a clear perimeter around the house before the crew arrives. Patio furniture, grills, planters, decorative stones, and garden statues near the foundation should all be moved away to give the crew room to set up ladders and staging without working around obstacles. For a full picture of what exterior painting prep looks like from our side, take a look at our exterior services page.
Remove Wall Hangings and Hardware
Take down everything mounted to the walls before the crew arrives: artwork, mirrors, shelving, hooks, and anything else that would require working around or protecting individually. While you’re at it, remove outlet covers and switch plates with a screwdriver. It’s ten minutes of work that makes for significantly cleaner cut lines around every electrical fixture in the room, and it saves your painter from having to tape around hardware edges.
Handle Window Treatments
Curtains and drapes should come down entirely and stored somewhere out of the work area. Blinds can generally stay up but will need to be tied back or covered during the job. Long curtains that pool on the floor are a particular problem alongside drop cloths and moving equipment, so if you’re unsure whether something needs to come down, the answer is almost always yes. When you schedule the job, ask your Fagan crew specifically what they’ll need cleared in each room.
Point Out Problem Areas During the Walkthrough
A ceiling stain from a leak that was repaired two years ago, a drywall patch that was never properly primed, screw holes from a gallery wall, areas where previous paint is peeling or bubbling, surfaces that have been painted with oil-based products under layers of latex. Your painter needs to know about all of it before work begins. These details affect product selection, how much prep time gets built in, and whether additional priming is needed in specific areas. Flagging them at the walkthrough means they’re factored into the job from the start rather than discovered mid-project and handled as unplanned additions.
Older homes throughout Pittsburgh, particularly in neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill, Lawrenceville, and Mt. Lebanon, often carry decades of paint history with multiple previous owners and contractors. If there’s any known history of water intrusion, lead paint, or prior surface prep that wasn’t done well, share it.
Make a Plan for Pets
Painting involves open doors, unfamiliar people moving through the house, and fumes that are a real factor even with low-VOC products. Dogs need a concrete plan for the duration of the job, whether that’s boarding, a friend’s house, or a room completely outside the work area with someone home to manage them. Cats can usually be sequestered in a back bedroom, but check with your crew before the job starts about which rooms are being worked on and in what order so you can set up accordingly.
Think About What Comes After
Before the crew packs up, decide how you want furniture arranged once the room is finished. Moving heavy pieces back into position after paint has fully cured is better for the walls, and if you want your crew to help with placement, that conversation is easier to have on the last day of the job than a week later. If your layout is changing from how the room was set up before the project, let someone on the crew know at the start so it’s accounted for.
Make Access and Communication Easy
If you won’t be home during the job, sort out key access ahead of time and establish a direct line of communication with your crew. Make sure they know where the breaker box is, which bathroom they can use, and whether any areas of the house are off-limits. The less a crew has to figure out on their own once work is underway, the more time goes toward the project itself.
Work With a Crew That Makes It Easy
Fagan Painting has been working in Pittsburgh homes since 2010, and the jobs that go smoothest are consistently the ones where the homeowner and the crew are aligned before anyone picks up a brush. When you hire us, you get a walkthrough before work begins, a crew that communicates throughout the project, and a finished product backed by a two-year warranty.
If you want to see what other Pittsburgh homeowners have said about working with us, our reviews speak for themselves. Ready to get started? Request a free estimate and we’ll take it from there.