Most painters give you a number. We give you a quote.

If you've gathered three painting quotes lately, you've probably noticed they're wildly different — and you've probably wondered why.

Here's the truth most contractors won't tell you: most painting quotes are guesses. They walk through your house, mentally pace the rooms, multiply by a per-square-foot rate they've used for ten years, and write a number on a piece of paper. That's why mid-job surprises are so common in this industry. The painter wasn't lying — they just weren't measuring.

I've spent twenty-five years building a different way to do this.

A 20×20 room, two ways.

Here's the simplest example I can give you of why per-square-foot pricing is broken.

Imagine two rooms, both 20×20, both with 9-foot ceilings.

The first is open-concept. Four walls, one ceiling, baseboard around the perimeter — 80 lineal feet of baseboard, 720 square feet of wall drywall, one door.

The second is divided into four bedrooms. Same 400 square foot floor. Same 400 square foot ceiling. But now you have 160 lineal feet of baseboard, 1,440 square feet of wall drywall, and four doors with frames to cut around.

Same square footage. Exactly double the wall drywall, double the baseboard, four times the door work.

A per-square-foot quote on those two rooms is either too high (you're overpaying for the open one) or too low (the painter loses money on the divided one and finds ways to make it back somewhere else). Neither outcome is fair to you.

We don't issue final quotes by the square foot. We never have.

How we actually do it.

Every Roll On quote is engineered from the actual surfaces of your specific property.

We measure walls in square feet. Baseboards, casings, window trim, door frames, and risers in lineal feet. Doors and door frames as individual units. Spindles by the spindle. Stair treads by the tread. Caulking and filling by the lineal foot.

For each line item, we apply production rates I've measured across thousands of jobs over twenty-five years. How many square feet of wall my crew sprays per hour. How many spindles per hour by hand. How many lineal feet of caulking per hour around trim. How long it takes to mask cabinets, re-and-re a door, or label and re-hang trim properly.

Access and elevation are quoted separately because they materially change labour time. Step ladder work is slower than ground work. Scaffold work is slower than ladder work. Extension ladder, scissor lift, boom lift, bad terrain — each adjusts the hours.

Then we layer in materials at known spread rates (we know how many square feet a gallon of each product covers, on each surface, with each application method). We add overhead, fuel, sundries, rentals, and miscellaneous job costs as actual percentages built from years of profit-and-loss data, not guesses.

The number you get is the number you pay.

What you get from us.

A real quote. Itemized. The walls, the ceilings, the trim, the doors, the cabinets, the prep, the access, the materials. You'll see what we're charging for and why. If something changes mid-job — and on cottage projects, things sometimes do — we tell you before we change it, not after.

That said: a handful of our long-term clients, including several custom builders we've worked with for years, hire us by the hour instead of by quote. Imagine asking a painting crew to stain and clear-coat your entire project — ash walls, douglas fir beams, oak trim, selective whitewashing throughout — on an open-ended hourly clock. It happens more than you'd think. For builders managing custom homes where finishes change on the fly, where the client switches the bedroom from grey to greige three weeks in, where the spec sheet is a moving target, they want a painting partner they can trust to bill honestly and work efficiently without a hard scope.

Ballpark ranges.

Most cottage owners want a rough idea before booking a consultation. Below are honest ballparks for context. They are not quotes. The only honest number is the one we give you after walking your site.

What is not in a Roll On quote.

A surprise. A hidden line item. A change order that wasn't discussed first. A price designed to win the job and recovered through corner-cutting later.

Ready for a real quote?

Book a cottage consultation. We'll come to your property, measure what's actually there, and send you an engineered quote within 5 business days.

For most projects we provide quotes three ways: through an on-site walk-through (best for cottages and complex jobs), by phone, or by email if you can describe the scope clearly.