How to Brief a Painter

This post was most recently updated on September 23rd, 2019

Have you ever had a painter botch a room with the wrong colour?

Well, perhaps I’m just unlucky, but it’s happened to me more than once. Take for instance when we were just days away from moving into our new home (a few years ago), and my then 3-year old daughter’s room was mistakenly painted blue instead of bubble gum pink. Of all mistakes! She wasn’t at all impressed. Of course, it was re-painted just under the wire of our closing date.

This time around with our basement development project, I’m going to try and avoid any more painting bloopers. I’ve devised what I hope is a fool-proof briefing method. I must say, it’s really high tech. Just kidding; it’s soooo not. It’s actually so obvious that I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it earlier.

Drum roll please…

Hooray for Post-it notes!

Given that my colour scheme involves three colours + white,

AND that we are planning bead board on some walls, and accent walls in other areas, I figure that there’s a fair chance our painter could screw things up if I leave it to his memory. (I’m not giving him much credit, am I? Poor guy. Well, you know what they say: once bitten, twice shy.)

I’ve made my instructions really simple for him to follow by placing post-it notes on each wall with the correct colour name and code.

This also allows him to more easily judge how much of each paint colour he needs to purchase.

This exercise was actually a really helpful method for ‘visualizing’ the transitions from one colour to another throughout the space.

Once I had all my initial post-its up, I lived with my colour choices for a few days. Each time I walked through the space, I ended up ‘seeing’ something problematic. So I’d just pull off the post-it note, and replace it with another colour until I was finally happy with it.

Easy peasey.

So the next time you need to brief a painter, pull out your post-its and start sticking. It’s fool-proof. I hope!