Here are two tips to follow when using residential painting services.

Relocate your furniture and appliances to other rooms if some walls need several coats

The number of coats the residential painter will need to apply to some of your home's walls will depend on their current condition. If you've asked them to paint over some heavily patterned wallpaper, then they might need to apply several more coats of paint to these walls to cover this pattern than they would to a wall that was covered in plain paint.

In rooms like this, it's best not to just move the furniture and appliances into the middle of the rooms but to relocate them to other areas of your home. The reason for this is that the painter will probably need to wait several hours between every coat of paint. As such, it may take them quite a few days to finish painting these rooms.

If you need to use the furniture and appliances that are normally in these areas, then it might not be practical to use them whilst they're squashed together in the centre of each room. As such, it's best to relocate them to other areas that are not currently being painted and temporarily set up camp in these spots instead. For example, you might want to move your freestanding kitchen appliances and kitchen table to the living room for a week or so and use this as your kitchen for this brief period; this will allow you to easily use these items without interrupting the painter and will reduce the number of obstacles they have to work around whilst they paint these rooms.

Ask the painter for details about any trade paints they use

Unless a homeowner requests that their painter use a specific, widely available paint brand, residential painters will often use trade paints. If this is what your painter will be using, you should ask them for some details about the paint, as you may not know much about it (other than its colour and finish) if it's a trade version of this product.

You might, for example, want to ask them if it's oil or water-based; knowing that they've used the latter will mean you can avoid using soaking-wet cloths when cleaning the walls (as applying this much water to walls covered in this paint might result in some of the paint coming off on the wet cloth). Likewise, if it's an oil-based trade paint, you'll need to keep in mind that removing marks from it will be a bit trickier than removing marks from a wall with water-based paint, and you may need to use some extra-strong detergent for this task.