We're Painting Again: Part 3

We finished painting my studio shelves! It's been about a month now. Since we finished, I had to wrap up another school year of teaching, finish making my student recital video, we took our first road trip in over a year and a half (this time with TWO children), and then I had to get ready for my summer teaching schedule.

I'm so happy with the way it turned out. Is it perfect? Nope. It was definitely one of my faster projects and I rushed through some parts. Also, with all the rain we've been having, paint dries pretty slowly so painting the cabinet doors and shelves was a little difficult to maximize brushes and paint. I actually put on two coats of primer and two coats of paint in 5.5 hours. 😳 

Don't ask me to do it again though, I'm not sure I could unless it were 100 degrees outside

So how does this compare cost wise to hiring out? Let's take a look.

I'm assuming that a professional painter would have quoted me anywhere from $750-$1000+ in addition to the cost of paint to complete this. And it would have taken about 3 days. I'd mentioned in part 1 I would not have allowed them to use a sprayer to paint this despite it being the quickest and easiest way to do so because I have a semi-concert grand piano in the same room. So for simplicity and estimation, I'm going to use $1,000 as the cost to hire out and get this job done.

Here's a complete list of materials and their complete cost. Different retailers price differently so these are the approximate actual prices we paid from various retailers:

Zinser Primer 1 gallon: $24

Benjamin Moore Paint 1 gallon: $60

24 Paint Rollers: $10

Zibra Paint Brush: $10

Painting Pyramids: $12

TSP Cleaner: $6

1 roll of Painter's Tape: $3

Sanding Materials*: $5

Wood Putty: $5

Paint Pourer: $1

Total: $136 + tax : $150 to round up.

*we already had an orbital sander and sanding sheets to use which saved us so much time with this project. The other option is to buy sanding blocks which is what accounts for the $5.

Let's take a look at the actual cost of materials for this specific project though. 

Zinser Primer 1 gallon: $24 --> actual used was 1/4 gallon: $6

Benjamin Moore Paint 1 gallon: $60 --> actual used was 1/5 gallon: $12

24 Paint Rollers: $10 --> actual used was 3 rollers: $1.25

Zibra Paintbrush: $10 --> this was a new cost. so actual is still $10. but this brush is amazing and worth all the money.

Painting Pyramids: $12 --> we bought this when we first started painting so they've been used a multitude of times. we'll call it $1

TSP Cleaner: $6 --> actual used is almost negligible because you dilute the bottle and then spray to clean so we'll call it $1

1 roll of Painter's Tape: $3 --> actual used was probably 1/3 of a roll: $1

Sanding Materials*: $5 --> I clarified above what the $5 means so we will keep it for the actual: $5 

Wood Putty: $5 --> actual used 1/5: $1

Paint Pourer: $1 --> we've used this paint pourer so many times through various projects I think it has earned it's worth. : $0

Actual Total: $38

If you go one step further and actually look at how much of this was new money spent, that would only include the Zibra paintbrush and the 24 pack of paint rollers. So the true actual amount of new money spent on this project was $11.25.

The total number of hours we spent on doing this was approximately 10-15 hours of labor spread across 3 weeks. Considering this wasn't time being taken from anything else we would have done normally, I'd say it's almost negligible. We may have lost some hours of Netflix or browsing our phones, but I think we picked a much more productive way to spend our 15 hours of time. 

Now if you're attentive or extra observant or have experience painting, you might be wondering, there were no paint trays mentioned in the list of materials used. What in the world were you painting out of?

Well I'll tell you. We were painting out of to-go containers! 

Over the years we've amassed so many of these in ever so slightly different shapes that organizing them in our kitchen cabinets was getting to be more annoying than it was worth. So we poured our primer and paint into them to paint. Total cost? $0! (If you want to be super technical, there was a cost to pay for the food originally contained in them, but let's not do that.)

So there you have it, a complete break down of what we used and the total cost of this project. As I've already said, and if you can't already tell, I'm super happy with this project and the way it turned out. 

I need some more shelves. In due time.

We saved ourselves around $988.75! Worth it? Worth it. 🙂