Apartment Turnover Painting

Painting to a Move Out Date

A turnover repaint is not a smaller version of a house repaint. It is the same work under a deadline set by somebody else, usually a showing that has already been advertised. The measure of the job is not how good the walls look on the last day, it is how good they look on the day they had to look good.

We run turnovers in Santa Monica for owners, resident managers and property management offices. The scope is agreed before we arrive, the unit is ours for an agreed number of working days, and the keys come back on the day we said. If a date does not work, we say so at the quote rather than halfway through.

What the Scope Actually Covers

Turnover scopes fall into three honest levels, and mixing them up is how a unit ends up looking uneven under a leasing photo.

Patch and spot coat. Nail holes and anchor holes filled, corner knocks and furniture scrapes cut back and skimmed, water marks sealed with a stain blocking primer, then the affected walls coated corner to corner. Never a dab in the middle of a wall, because a patch coated on its own flashes in the afternoon and reads as a repair. This is the right call when the existing colour is a known match and the tenancy was short.

Full walls and ceilings. Everything coated wall to wall. This is the scope after a long tenancy, after a smoker, after a colour change, or any time the previous colour is a guess. It is also the only scope that gives a genuinely even finish across a whole room.

Walls, ceilings and trim. The above plus door faces, jambs, baseboards, window casings and closet trim, degreased, deglossed, caulked where the joints have opened and recoated in an enamel that will survive being knocked. In the older Santa Monica buildings this is the line between a unit that looks tired and one that looks looked after. It adds roughly half a day on a one bedroom and a full day on a larger unit, and we price it as its own item so you can decide.

The Days, Written Down

A studio or a one bedroom, walls and ceilings, on a known colour, is one working day. Add trim and it is two. A two bedroom with trim is two days, three if the repair list is long or the ceilings are textured. Those are working days with a crew in the unit, not calendar days, and they assume the unit is empty, cleaned out and has power.

The sequence matters as much as the count. Paint goes on before new flooring and before the final clean, and after any drywall or plumbing repair. A turnover where the flooring crew is booked for the same morning as us is a turnover that loses a day, and it is the single most common reason a unit misses its showing.

Coastal Details Worth Knowing

Morning marine layer humidity is real and it slows recoat times. A crew that starts at seven, closes the windows and stacks two coats on before noon in a damp unit gets soft paint, visible roller lap marks and a callback. We work the airflow instead, running the job so the second coat goes on when the first is genuinely ready.

Buildings from before 1978 are handled under lead safe practice as a matter of course. That means containment, wet scraping and sanding rather than dry, no heat guns on old layers, and a proper clean up at the end of each day. It adds time. It does not add drama.

Booking a Turnover

Call (424) 514-7572 with the address, the unit size, the move out date and the showing date. We will walk it if it is a building we have not painted, quote the scope in days and dollars, and hold the slot. If the window is too tight for the scope you want, we will tell you which parts to drop rather than rush the whole thing.