What house painting costs in Melbourne

Inside the house

• A single room$450 to $1,200Walls, ceiling and trim, two coats over full preparation.
• Three bedroom home, throughout$4,500 to $9,000Walls, ceilings, doors, frames and skirting across the whole house.
• Four or five bedroom home, throughout$7,500 to $14,000Larger homes, and anything with high or raked ceilings.
• Ceilings only$1,200 to $2,500Across an average home, often after water damage or a smoke stain.
• Staircase or timber joinery$1,500 to $2,800On new timber, stained and clear coated rather than painted, so the grain still reads. Where an old finish has to be stripped back first, it costs more.

Outside the house

• Single storey exterior$5,500 to $12,000Walls, fascia, eaves and gutters. Render and brick sit at the lower end.
• Double storey exterior$10,000 to $20,000Height means scaffolding or a lift, which is most of the difference.
• Weatherboard$5,000 to $12,000Boards have to be sanded, gaps filled and primed. Most of the cost is in that work, not in the painting itself.
• Deck or verandah$1,500 to $4,000Pressure washed with a deck cleaner, dried, machine sanded, then deck paint.
• Garage door$500 to $900Metal primer plus two topcoats.

Roofs, floors and driveways

• Tile roof$3,500 to $7,500High pressure washed first, then resprayed. Size and pitch drive the number.
• Garage floor$1,200 to $2,600Acid washed back to open concrete, then a floor grade coating.
• Driveway or hardstand$1,800 to $4,000Same system, more square metres.

Commercial and new builds

• Shops, offices, schools and industrialQuoted per siteToo variable for a bracket. Access, hours and staging change it more than floor area does. Night and weekend work is quoted the same way, without a premium tacked on for the hour of day.
• New buildsQuoted per siteNew plaster takes three coats rather than two, and the programme date is part of what is being priced.

• All the preparationSanding, filling cracks and chips, priming where it is needed. This is the part that decides how the job looks in five years, and it is never the part we shorten.
• Protecting your houseFloors, carpet, furniture and appliances covered before anything starts.
• Dulux paintIncluded in the quoted figure. You get the leftover tin with the brand, colour code and batch number on it, and the receipt if you want it.
• Cleaning upTools washed and the site tidied every evening, not just at the end.
• A seven year workmanship warrantyOn our work. Paint defects sit with the manufacturer, and movement or cracking in the building itself is not covered.
• $20 million public liabilityInsured through AAMI, certificate available on request.

Through the inner east and bayside, in Brighton, Malvern, Kew and Armadale, most of the housing is Victorian and Edwardian. Ornate cornices, ceiling roses and cast iron lace all have to be cut in by hand, and the plaster underneath has usually been painted over several times, so these jobs sit at the upper end of their bracket. Across the inner west and the north, around Yarraville, Footscray, Essendon and Preston, weatherboard is the common thing, and boards take far longer to prepare than render does. Out in the growth corridors, at Point Cook, Melton, Tarneit and Berwick, the houses are six or seven years old and coming up to their first repaint, with sound modern surfaces underneath, which is why those quotes tend to come in at the lower end. Down the coast at Frankston, through the Mornington Peninsula and out to Torquay, salt air and sun strip an exterior faster than anywhere else in the state, so exteriors come around more often there. Out through the shaded north east at Ringwood and Lilydale, damp and moss mean the roof is usually the job before the walls are. And we go further again when the work calls for it, out to Ballarat, Geelong and into regional Victoria, without adding the distance to your quote.