Bidding
This is not a price list. A number that means anything comes off your own walls — how much prep they need, how much trim there is, how hard the surfaces are to reach, and what the existing coat is doing. Here is what a bid is actually counting.
Prep hours
The largest line on most exteriors, and the one that separates two bids for the same house. Washing, scraping to a sound edge, feather-sanding the transition, filling, caulking. Sound paint takes a coat. Failing paint takes removal first, and removal is measured in hours.
Linear feet of trim
Trim, fascia, corner boards, window casings, and door casings are brushed and cut by hand. A house with deep window counts and heavy trim detail costs more to paint than a plain wall of the same size, because the hand work is what the hours go into.
Height and access
A wall a ladder can stand square against moves quickly. A second-storey gable over a deck, a stairwell ceiling, a run above a sloped bed, or anything that needs staging rather than a ladder moves slowly, and the setup happens before any paint does.
Surface condition
Chalking, mildew, alligatored film, open joints, and bare wood each add their own step. Condition is read surface by surface on the walk, because one elevation can be sound while the one that takes the weather is not.
Substrate
The substrate sets the prep and the product. Bare wood needs primer the day it is exposed, stucco takes a different film build, and vinyl narrows what may be put on it at all. Naming the substrate is what makes a product line on a scope mean anything.
Colour change
Colour on colour of similar depth covers differently from light over dark, and a change of colour on trim means every cut line is worked twice rather than once. This is a coverage question, and it is answered per surface.
Two scopes, one house
Most of the gap between two scopes is not the rate. It is what each one decided to count. One counted the hours to strip a failing south elevation; the other assumed a coat would go straight over it. One named the product and sheen per surface; the other wrote a single word. One put masking, covering, and daily cleanup in as labour; the other left them to be absorbed somewhere.
The scope that lists more is not the more expensive one. It is the one you can hold up at the end of the job and check, line by line, against the house. A scope you cannot check is a number without a job attached to it.
What to compare
Questions
A written estimate requires a walkthrough. Photos cannot show how much prep a surface needs; paint can look sound in a photograph and still leave chalk on your hand.
Because it is where the hours are, and a line of its own is the only place they are visible. Rolled into a single square-foot figure, prep is the easiest thing to leave out without the page showing it, which is also why it is the line that explains most of the difference between two scopes for one house.
The number tracks the written scope, so it moves only where the scope moves first. The scope is the document that was priced: a condition found once the old coat is off is not part of it, so it becomes a new line on it, with its own hours, and that line is what the decision is made against. The order is what matters — the writing sits between finding something and doing something about it.
Because size is not the driver — condition, access, and trim detail are. A large plain wall in sound paint is fewer hours than a small house with failing trim over a sloped bed.
Send what needs painting and which city. That message is what a walk gets set up from, and the walk is what a number comes out of.
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