How many days does an exterior repaint actually take

A single-storey Wellington weatherboard house in reasonable condition takes about five to ten working days. A two-storey house, or any house needing heavy scraping and timber repairs, runs longer, up to about three weeks. Those are working days, and in this city the calendar is always longer than the working days.

The painting itself is the fast part. Preparation is where the time goes, and weather decides how much of each week you actually get.

Everything below is what our own jobs run to on Wellington weatherboard houses, not an industry standard. Treat it as a shape rather than a promise, because the same house in worse condition sits at the far end of every range.

Where does the time actually go?

Stage	Typical time, single-storey weatherboard	What stretches it
Access set up	Half a day to a day	Steep or terraced sections, tight boundaries, roof edge protection
Wash down	Half a day, plus one to two days drying	Humidity, walls that get no sun, heavy mould growth
Scrape, sand and fill	One to five days	The single largest variable in the whole job
Timber and joinery repairs	Half a day to several days	Rot found only once the paint comes off
Priming bare areas	Half a day to a day	How much was stripped back
Two topcoats	Two to four days	Recoat times, cold mornings, colour changes
Joinery, gutters, downpipes, detail	One to two days	Number of windows and doors
Take down and clean up	Half a day	Nothing much

Add those up and a straightforward house lands in the five to ten day range. Notice that the two coats everyone pictures when they imagine the job are a third of it at most.

Why are working days and calendar days so different here?

Because a working day on an exterior needs a dry surface and a dry enough spell afterwards, and Wellington does not hand those out reliably. A run of working days can spread across a good deal more of the calendar, and it spreads furthest in winter.

Nothing has gone wrong when that happens. It is the ordinary gap between days worked and days elapsed, and it is the reason any honest estimate here is given in working days rather than as a finish date.

What makes a job take twice as long as expected?

Four things, in rough order of frequency.

• Prep found after scraping starts. Paint hides what is underneath. Soft board ends, split boards, failed putty and corroded fixings only reveal themselves once the old coating comes off, and repairs interrupt the sequence.
• Water still getting in. A leaking gutter or a failed flashing has to be fixed before coating, and that can mean waiting on another trade.
• One elevation far worse than the others. South and west walls take the weather, so one side can need days of work while the other three need a wash and two coats.
• Weather sequencing. Losing the day after a wash matters more than losing a random day, because it resets the drying clock on that wall.

Does the whole house get done at once?

Usually not, and that is deliberate. Most exterior repaints move elevation by elevation, following the sun and the shelter, so the crew is working on a wall that is dry while another one dries out. It also means the house is never entirely wrapped in scaffolding and sheeting at once on a tight section.

The practical consequence for you: the house looks half finished for most of the job, with one wall in new colour and three in the old. That is normal, not a sign of anything going wrong.

Can you make it faster?

Partly.

More painters compresses the scraping, sanding and coating stages, which are the biggest blocks of time, so a two-person job on a big house is not the same as one person taking twice as long. What extra people cannot compress is drying and recoat time, so there is a floor under any exterior job that no amount of resourcing gets below.

What you can do to help: decide the colours before the start date, not during the job. Clear access around the house, including moving vehicles, trailers and anything stored against the walls. Cut back shrubs touching the cladding. Have any known gutter or flashing work booked ahead of the paint crew rather than discovered mid-job. Each of those saves real hours on a full exterior repaint.

What about a partial job?

A single elevation, or the joinery only, is usually two to four working days including access and drying. Gutters, fascia and downpipes as a standalone piece of work sit at a similar scale.

Partial jobs are worth considering when the house is sound overall but one weather-facing wall has gone. Repainting that wall on its own restores the protection where it matters and costs a fraction of the full job, at the price of a slight difference in freshness between elevations that fades within a couple of years anyway.

Getting a timeframe for your own house

Every number above is an average of houses that are not yours. The thing that decides your job is the state of the coating on the worst elevation, and that cannot be judged from a photograph or a floor area. It takes someone at the wall with a scraper, finding out whether the paint lets go in sheets or holds everywhere except a few board ends. That one answer moves an estimate more than the size of the house does.

If you want an estimate based on your house rather than an average, we will walk it and tell you which elevation is going to take the time. Ask for a quote.