Rolling paint onto a wall is quick. It is close to the least time-consuming part of a repaint, which is why “how long will it take?” so often gets answered wrongly — by people estimating the painting and forgetting everything around it.
Where the time actually goes
On a typical interior repaint, the rough shape is:
- Setting up and protecting — moving furniture, covering everything, masking.
- Repair and preparation — filling, crack repair, sanding, caulking, priming. On a wall in poor condition this is the largest single block of time in the whole job.
- Cutting in — the edges, by hand, where the wall meets ceiling, trim and corners. A roller covers a large area fast; a brush edge is slow and cannot be rushed without it showing.
- Rolling — genuinely quick.
- Second coat — after the first has dried properly.
- Trim and doors — usually the last thing, and slower than walls because enamel needs a careful hand and doors have many faces.
- Putting the room back and cleaning.
A room with sound walls and a similar colour is a short job. The same room with cracked plaster, three colour changes and detailed trim can take several times longer. The square footage barely moved; the condition did.
Dry is not cured
These are two different things and confusing them causes most of the damage that happens after a job finishes.
Dry means the surface is dry to the touch and can take another coat — typically a few hours for modern latex paints, longer in a cold or humid room.
Cured means the film has hardened fully and reached its final durability. That takes considerably longer — commonly a couple of weeks, sometimes up to a month depending on the product and conditions.
Practically, that means for the first couple of weeks:
- Do not scrub the walls. Dust them gently if you must.
- Do not push furniture hard against freshly painted walls.
- Be careful taping anything to the surface — it can lift paint that feels perfectly dry.
- Do not close a freshly painted door onto its stop for as long as you can bear it, and when you do, expect it to want to stick a little.
Bathrooms and kitchens are worst for this, because heat and steam arrive before the paint is ready for them.
Ceilings, trim and the order of things
There is an order to a repaint and it is not arbitrary:
- Ceilings first. Anything that spatters lands on walls that are about to be painted anyway.
- Walls next.
- Trim, doors and frames last. Enamel needs the cleanest possible environment, because dust settles into a slow-drying finish and stays there.
Anyone doing trim first and walls afterwards is making extra work for themselves, and usually for you.
Exteriors and the Ontario problem
Exterior painting in Ontario has a season, and it is shorter than people think.
Most exterior coatings need a surface and air temperature above a minimum — often around 10°C, though low-temperature products go lower — and they need it to stay there while the film forms. A warm afternoon followed by a cold night can ruin a coat that looked perfect at 4pm.
Beyond temperature:
- Surfaces must be dry. After rain, siding needs time to dry properly, not an hour of sun.
- Dew matters. Painting too late in the day can mean dew forming on a film that has not set.
- Direct sun is its own problem. Paint on a hot surface skins over too fast and cannot flow out properly, so you work around the building following the shade.
The practical consequence: an exterior schedule is weather-dependent, and any painter who guarantees exact dates months ahead is guessing. Being told “we will move you if the week looks wrong” is a good sign, not a bad one.
What a realistic answer sounds like
A useful timeline says what it depends on. Something like: this many working days assuming the walls are in the condition the photographs suggest, with the second coat the following day, and trim on the final day — and if the plaster is worse than it looks, we will tell you before we start rather than after.
An estimate that promises a single day for a job everyone else quoted as three is not faster. It is doing less.