What makes commercial painting different from residential?
The paint is the easy part. What a commercial client is actually buying is work that does not interrupt the business, and that is a scheduling problem before it is a painting problem.
Retail and restaurant work happens after close. Offices happen on weekends. Occupied multifamily happens 1 stack at a time with notices posted at least 24 hours before the crew arrives, not after. We plan the sequence around your hours and put it in writing with the quote, so you know which nights the crew is in the building.
Who is this for?
The work splits into four kinds of client, and each wants something slightly different from the same crew:
- Offices and professional suites — weekend turnarounds, no smell on Monday
- Retail and restaurants — overnight work, everything reset before opening
- Multifamily and condo interiors — corridors, stairwells and amenity spaces, phased so residents always have a route
- General contractors — painting as a subcontract on new build and remodel. See subcontractor painting.
What paperwork do you provide before starting?
A certificate of insurance naming your company or the management entity as certificate holder, and a W-9, before the first job rather than after it. That is the item that most often delays a first commercial engagement, so we send it with the proposal instead of waiting to be asked.
Invoices carry before-and-after photographs of the work. For a property manager billing an owner, or a facilities lead justifying a line item, that is the part that makes the invoice easy to approve.
Do you do the repairs too, or only paint?
Both, with one crew. Commercial interiors rarely need only paint: they need drywall repair in corridors that have been hit by carts, texture matching so the repair is not a visible rectangle, and often stucco patching outside.
Splitting that across two vendors means two mobilisations, two COIs and an argument if something does not match. One responsible party is worth more than a small saving on a line item.
How much notice does a commercial job need?
Two weeks is comfortable for scheduling a night or weekend crew; 48 to 72 hours is possible for property manager and facilities clients we already have a COI on file with. The paperwork, not the paint, is what makes a first engagement slow.
A typical 2,000 square foot office suite — walls, doors and trim — is 2 nights with a 3-person crew working 6pm to 6am. Retail of the same size is usually 1 night, because there is less trim and fewer rooms to cut in. Corridors in occupied multifamily go one stack per night so residents always have a route to their door.
Low-odour, low-VOC products are standard on occupied commercial work rather than an upgrade. They recoat in 2 to 4 hours, which is what makes a single overnight window enough, and there is no smell at opening.