Painting Contractors in Basking Ridge and Bernardsville, NJ

Hiring a Painter in New Jersey: What I’d Want to Know Before Someone Starts Moving My Furniture

By Tiffany Slowinski

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Painting is one of those home projects that looks incredibly simple right up until someone does it badly.

Technically, yes, I can buy a roller.

I can also spend an entire Saturday painting one room, discover that the color I loved on a two-inch sample looks vaguely institutional on four walls, get paint on the ceiling and spend the next three years staring at the one spot behind the dresser I missed.

There are times when I am perfectly happy to DIY.

There are also rooms where I want someone else to make it look right.

The hard part is figuring out who that someone should be.

You ask a neighbor. You Google painters near you. You get three estimates that somehow describe three completely different projects.

One painter says two days.

Another says five.

One includes the paint.

One does not.

Someone mentions two coats. Someone else starts talking about primer, sanding and caulk.

Now I have questions.

The first one is pretty simple: What are you actually going to do before you paint?

Because the more I have learned about painting, the more I realize the painting itself may be the easy part.

I want to know what happens to nail holes, cracks, peeling areas and old caulk. Are the walls getting sanded? Are stains being primed? Are gaps around the trim being fixed? What happens to the places where the last painter got a little creative?

If I am paying someone to paint my house, I am not really paying them to put color on a wall.

I am paying them to make the finished wall look good.

That usually starts before the paint can opens.

Then there is the quote.

If two painting estimates are wildly different, I would not automatically assume one painter is expensive and the other is a bargain.

I would make sure they are actually quoting the same job.

How many coats are included? Is primer included where needed? Who is buying the paint? Which paint line are they using? Are ceilings, closets, doors and trim included? What about minor wall repairs?

And what happens if the room needs more prep than expected?

I want all of that spelled out before there are drop cloths covering half my house.

The phrase “two coats” is another one I would ask about.

Two coats of what, exactly?

Sometimes a color change truly needs multiple coats. Sometimes primer matters. Sometimes the existing wall and the new paint are close enough that the job is different.

I am not trying to manage the painter.

I just want to understand what the finished price includes so nobody is having an awkward conversation halfway through the job.

Color is its own issue.

I can spend 45 minutes deciding between two shades of white that look identical to everyone else in my family and completely different to me.

If you are like me, ask whether the painter helps with color decisions or works with a color consultant.

Then test the color in the actual room.

Morning light is different from afternoon light. A north-facing room can make a color feel completely different than it did in the paint store. The couch, flooring and trim all change it too.

I would rather live with a few large sample patches for three days than repaint the family room because the “warm neutral” turned lavender at 4 p.m.

For exterior painting, I have even more questions.

What condition is the existing paint in?

What gets scraped or sanded?

How is mildew handled?

Does bare wood get primed?

What happens to rotted trim?

How are the windows, roof, landscaping and hardscaping protected?

Exterior painting is one of those jobs where the prep may be the difference between something that looks great for a season and something that holds up.

I would also ask what product they are recommending and why.

I do not need the most expensive paint simply because it exists.

I do want the right product for the surface, the room and the way we actually live.

A powder room and a kid’s bathroom do not necessarily need the same thing. Neither does a formal dining room and a mudroom that gets hit with backpacks, dogs and whatever else comes through the door.

If I am painting cabinets, that is another conversation entirely.

I would want to know how they are being cleaned and prepped, what product is being used, whether doors are sprayed or brushed, where the work happens and how long I realistically need to keep everyone out of the kitchen.

Cabinet painting can look fantastic.

It can also look like someone painted the cabinets.

Those are not the same thing.

Then there is the question nobody loves asking: Who is actually going to be in my house?

Is the person giving me the estimate also supervising the work?

Are the painters employees or subcontractors?

Who is my point person if I have a question?

What time does the crew arrive?

Do they clean up at the end of each day?

If the project lasts several days, what does my house look like overnight?

None of that is glamorous.

It matters quite a bit when strangers are moving through your kitchen at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday.

I would also want to understand how the painter handles damage or something that does not look right.

Good contractors are still human.

A drip happens. A line is not perfect. Something gets missed.

I am less interested in pretending nothing will ever go wrong than I am in knowing how the company responds when it does.

That tells me a lot.

For older homes, there is one more question worth asking.

Federal lead-safe renovation rules can apply when a contractor disturbs painted surfaces in a home built before 1978. If your house falls into that category, ask whether the company is an EPA Lead-Safe Certified Firm and how it handles that work.

You do not need to become an expert in lead-safe rules.

You just need to know enough to ask.

And yes, I would check the contractor’s New Jersey registration too.

Painting itself is not a separately licensed trade in New Jersey. Businesses doing residential home-improvement painting work register with the state as Home Improvement Contractors.

That registration does not tell you whether someone is a great painter.

It does tell you whether the business appears in the state record as an active home-improvement contractor on the date it was checked.

That is useful information.

It is not the whole decision.

That is exactly how I would use the Garden State Circle guide.

We looked across Basking Ridge and Bernardsville for painting businesses and checked the public information we could verify, including active New Jersey Home Improvement Contractor registrations.

Some companies publish a lot online.

Others publish very little.

We are not ranking them and we are not pretending a state registration can tell you whose cut lines are perfect.

It cannot.

What it can do is give you a much better starting point.

From there, I would look at actual finished work. Ask what the quote includes. Ask how they prep. Ask who is going to be in your house. Ask what happens if something goes wrong.

Then pay attention to how they answer.

I do not need a painter to teach me everything they know about paint.

I need them to know everything they know about paint, explain the parts that matter to me and leave my house looking better than when they walked in.

That is the person I am hiring.