How Much Will It Cost To Paint The Exterior Of My House? (2023) | Great Plains Painting
Something we see people searching for a lot is an idea of the cost to paint their home. It’s difficult to put that in a blog post, and be accurate, but we’re going to try. That way, if you’re searching for it, you have an idea.
These prices are for exterior painting and do not include wood rot repair or siding work.
I think the best way to organize the pricing is by size of house. Keep in mind that we don’t price our work by size. Not all medium sized homes are the same price. Each house we look at ends up being its own unique price. They do tend to fall within a specific range, and that’s what we’ve tried to display here.
| Size of House | Cost to Paint |
|---|---|
| Small Home - Ranch or Reverse Ranch | $3,000 - $4,500 |
| Medium Home - 2 Stories | $4,500 - $6,000 |
| Large Home - 2+ Stories / > 4k Square Foot | $6,000 - $10,000 |
| Unique Old Large Homes Think Westport/Brookside Victorian Style | $12,000 - $20,000 |
Idea of the sizes for scale
| Small Home |
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| Medium Home |
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| Large Home |
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| Victorian Home |
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There’s the rough range of the prices, now let’s discuss what affects the prices.
Prep Work
The condition of your home is a huge factor in how much it costs to paint it.
If your paint looks like the photo above and you’d like your exterior painting project to be a quality one that lasts, more work is required to prep your house before painting. More work to prep increases the cost. In fact you can see in the photo that whomever painted this house didn’t do the proper prep, sprayed right over peeling paint, and the peeling paint problem is now taking the new paint off with it.
Prep isn’t limited to peeling paint. Caulking can add significant additional prep to a project to make it ready for exterior paint.
Windows
Are your windows wrapped, wooden, storm windows? If the windows are vinyl or metal wrapped, we don’t paint them and instead tape and plastic over them to protect them from overspray. This is the lowest cost option.
If you have old wooden windows that require painting, this adds significant cost to your project. We spray all the windows with a special product that primes the wood, but doesn’t bond to the glass. When we spray the windows with the exterior paint, after it dries we have to go back and peel all the paint off the panes of glass. Luckily the primer we use makes this easier, but depending on how many windows you have this adds significant cost.
Storm windows are the hardest to deal with and most expensive. If you’d like the storm windows removed, we must carefully take them all off, paint the wooden windows underneath as described above, and then put all the storm windows back on. Removing storm windows adds significant cost to a painting project.
Trim
Most homes we paint, the trim gets painted on the front of the house, and the face of the trim only.
This is pretty typical on any home built 1990s on and makes painting simpler and more efficient, therefore less expensive.
We have customers who would like to add color to the sides/back of their homes and request we paint the trim on the sides and back. This adds to the project cost.
The most expensive aspect of painting the trim is wrapping the edges. This must be completed by hand with a brush, and if there is lots of trim on your home, this takes a lot of time and will affect the cost greatly.
This is what makes the old victorian style homes typical in Westport/Waldo/Brookside more expensive to paint. They have 4 or more colors and require lots of detail work with brushes which is slow and tedious. Victorian style homes also tend to be tall.
Wood Rot
The amount of wood rot we need to replace before painting greatly affects project cost. We’ve worked on homes with $10,000 or more of wood rot repair. At that point it may be worth considering re-siding with James Hardie Siding (we can help you with Hardie Siding as well). If your home is around 20 years old and well maintained, we see < $1000 of wood rot on a project.
Height & Difficulty
How tall your home is and how difficult access is also affect the cost of the project. If your home is 3 stories are more, we have to use our biggest ladders to get to the top. This adds danger to what we’re doing, and therefore we slow down to make sure no one gets hurt working.
If your home is on a flat lot, setting our ladders up is easy and moving them around is easy. If your home is on a sloped lot, we have to spend more time carefully setting out ladders and making them level so they’re secure while we’re working on them. The greater the slope, the greater the difficulty/danger and the greater the cost.
We hope this gives you an idea of what a general cost is to paint a home based on size if you’re searching for exterior painting costs in Lee’s Summit, Kansas City, or Overland Park. If you’ve read through the major things that affect a painting project’s price and want to get an accurate cost, contact us and we’ll happily provide a free estimate.
Even if you’re not serious about getting your home painted right away, call us. We’d be happy to have you send us some photos of your home and we could ballpark a rough cost over the phone to give you an idea of what you’re working with.