Trim and door painting
Trim painting is the fussiest work in a house and the most visible when it is done badly, because trim sits at eye level and catches light along its whole length. Brush marks, drips at a mitre and a wavy line against the wall are all permanent until somebody sands them out. It is a separate line from wall painting inside our interior painting service, and it takes longer than people expect.
Service family Interior painting
Scheduling Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Service area Six counties across Southeast Michigan
Phone (734) 540-0347
What trim painting covers
Baseboard, door casing, window casing, stools and aprons, crown, chair rail, stair skirts and the doors themselves. It can be bought room by room or as a whole floor. A house where the walls have been repainted and the trim has not is the most common half finished result we get called to complete, and doing both at once costs less than doing them a year apart.
Oil under water based paint, the defining problem
Trim in any house painted before the mid nineties is likely oil based, and modern water based paint will not bond to a cured oil film. The test is a cotton pad with denatured alcohol: if paint comes off on the pad it is water based, if nothing moves it is oil. Where it is oil, the trim gets sanded to dull it and primed with a bonding primer before anything else.
What gets checked first
- Whether the existing paint is oil or water based
- Sheen of the existing finish, and how much it has yellowed
- Nail holes, dents and split mitres needing filling
- Caulk lines at the wall and at the floor
- Whether doors are solid, hollow core, or previously stained
Brush, spray and the honest trade off
A sprayed finish on trim is smoother than anything a brush can do, and it needs the room masked completely, which costs hours. Brushing is slower per foot, needs no masking and leaves a fine texture you can see up close. On occupied houses we brush trim and spray doors off their hinges, which gets the best of both without wrapping the whole room in plastic.
Doors: on the hinges or off
Painting a door in place means cutting around hinges and hardware and leaving brush marks in the field of the door. Taking it off, laying it flat on trestles and spraying or rolling it gives a finish that looks factory made. The trade off is a doorway with no door for a day, which is fine for a bedroom and awkward for a bathroom.
Sheen on trim
Trim takes more sheen than walls, both because it gets touched and because the contrast is part of how a room reads. Satin is the current default. Semi gloss is traditional and durable and shows every imperfection in the wood underneath. Flat trim looks soft and marks permanently. We will bring samples of two sheens in the colour rather than describe them.
Caulk lines that have split
The joint where trim meets the wall opens as a house moves, and painting over a split bead leaves a dark line that reads as a gap. Old caulk gets cut out, the joint gets a fresh bead of a paintable sealant and it is tooled before painting. That single step is what makes trim look attached to the wall rather than laid against it.
Filling nail holes and dents properly
Nail holes get filled with a hard setting filler rather than lightweight spackle, because spackle sinks as it dries and reappears as a dimple under gloss. Dents in softwood baseboard get filled in two passes and sanded flush. This is the stage that separates trim that looks new from trim that looks painted, and it is invisible in a quote.
Sanding, and the dust it makes
All trim needs sanding, either to dull a glossy surface or to flatten filler. That means dust at floor level through the whole room, so floors get covered, doorways sealed and sanding is done with a vacuum sander where the profile allows. Hand sanding into a moulded profile is slower and unavoidable on anything with detail.
White, and the fact that there are forty of them
Trim white is the most consequential small decision in a room. A cool white next to warm wall colour reads blue. A warm white next to a cool grey reads yellow. Matching existing trim in another room is harder than choosing fresh, because thirty year old oil paint has ambered. We sample on the actual trim and look at it at night as well as in daylight.
Stained trim being painted for the first time
Painting stained woodwork is a decision that cannot easily be undone, and we will make sure you have slept on it. The work is real: degreasing, sanding, a stain blocking primer to stop tannin bleed from oak or pine, then two finish coats. Done properly it looks like painted trim. Done with one coat of wall paint it looks like a mistake within a month.
Painted trim going back to bare wood
Stripping painted trim back to stainable wood is possible and it is slow, expensive work with an uncertain result, especially on softwood that has been filled. In most houses the better answer is replacing the trim in new wood, which is trim and finish carpentry rather than painting. We will give you both prices before you commit to either.
Paint and lead in houses built before the late seventies
Federal rules require work disturbing paint in a home built before nineteen seventy eight to be performed by a certified firm following specific work practices, and sanding trim disturbs paint by definition. On a house of that age the work is scoped with those rules in mind and the arrangement confirmed in writing before any sanding starts.
What comes off before we paint
- Door hardware, strike plates and stops
- Hinges, where the door is coming off anyway
- Switch and outlet plates adjacent to trim
- Curtain hardware and blind brackets
- Door bottoms and thresholds where they are being coated
Drying, and the door you cannot close
Fresh trim paint is dry to the touch in an hour and not cured for days, and a door closed against a painted stop too early will stick to it. We leave doors open and note which ones need to stay that way overnight. In damp weather that gets longer, and pushing it is how you end up with a paint skin torn off the stop in strips.
The order of a whole room
Ceiling first, walls second, trim last, is the order we work in. Where wallpaper removal or drywall patch repair is needed, it comes before all three. Doors that stick get sorted by door adjustment before they get painted, not after.
How long the work takes
Trim in one average bedroom, brushed, is most of a day including filling and caulk. Six doors sprayed off their hinges is a day plus drying. A whole floor of trim and doors is most of a week. Landlords book it with rental turnover repairs and sellers with pre listing home repairs, usually alongside new interior door installation.
Book trim and door painting with our crew
Run the alcohol test on a hidden piece of your own trim and tell us what happened, because oil or water decides the preparation and most of the price. We cover Plymouth and the wider area, handle window casing repair first where it is needed, and an annual home check keeps the touch up list short. View our Portfolio, then contact us now for a free quote.
