Getting Paint Bids-How Much To Pay for Interior Painting

[Robert Taylor]

As I've mentioned in other posts, for this current "crop" of projects, I'm subbing everything out, no more direct hire employees for me, at least for now. Tomorrow I have a couple of guys coming by to give me some estimates for painting the interior of one of my project houses. I did some searching of prior threads on here, but wasn't able to get too many solid answers for what I'm looking for, so I'll tell you as much as I can think of here about the house and the paint job:

-Its a 1700 sq foot, 2 story house that's just had new drywall installed on over 3/4 of the walls (we demo'd most of the ceilings for new wiring and insulation and a lot of the walls were pretty messed up, so it was easier to go over them with new drywall than to attempt to float them smooth with compound, etc.) and the walls that were left original were pretty straight and any cracks in them were patched, mudded and sanded smooth by the drywall guys. They then sprayed an orange peel texture over all of the walls to help them all look uniform. There's a total of 9 rooms counting everything (4 bedrooms each approx 8 x 12, one dining room/living room combo approx 25 x 12, kitchen 12 x 12, foyer 10 x 12, one full bathroom and one half bathroom) and everything needs painting.

-I'll probably stick with 3 or 4 shades of color, each room will have one wall color and an off white for the ceiling. I'm not doing accent walls or multiple colors in a single room or anything like that, it will be pretty basic. Colors will all be fairly neutral, I'm not going out an any limbs here!

-The walls will obviously need a primer coat with all of the raw drywall. For the paint itself, I always buy decent paint, I really like the Behr paint from Home Depot, I've done a lot of painting myself and have tried even the more expensive ones like Sherwin's Emerald and Duration on my own house and I really like Behr. I've also tried my share of cheap paint as well and I find that you get what you pay for! I will be supplying the paint, I get a 20% discount on Behr paint, so whoever paints it will be painting with decent paint. I'd still anticipate one primer coat and two paint coats, although with the Behr paint, it seems like the second coat is usually a quick one.

-Upstairs, there is some trim to paint as well. Downstairs, the woodwork is all stained, which I will be leaving as is, it looks very nice.

So, I'm wondering what people are paying for painters these days, like a room price to go by here, as I'm pretty clueless right now. I want to avoid paying someone by the hour and leaving it open ended like that, I always prefer to get either a flat rate or IF they really want it hourly, I want a not to exceed price.

Any other general advice here is also welcome! Thanks!