Paying for painting and decorating

[Flowersonthewall]

Just looking for opinions...

Two large reception rooms in Victorian end terrace. Both have been re plastered. Front room needs remaining back room needs to be lined and painted. Ceilings need painting. All woodwork needs sanding, filling and painting. Quote has come in at £1040 just for labour...8 days at 130 a day. Is that reasonable? Should we just go for it or spend the next eon doing it ourselves???

Sounds about right to me. There are bits of it you could do yourself though, such as the painting.

£130 a day is a reasonable day rate for a
decorator.

You could sand and fill the woodwork which would cut down the number of days.

I was thinking about doing the woodwork myself and perhaps painting the back reception room ourselves....just seems such a lot of money but I know it would save us an awful lot of hassle and seeing as I want it done before Christmas then maybe I should just suck it up! I think coming from a family that never paid anyone to do anything I find paying for painting a bit of a luxury!

Tbh id get someone to do the ceiling and the woodwork only. We have big victorian reception rooms and I think we spent max 3 days (3 hours a day) painting the walls in each of the two rooms.

We have yet to touch the ceilings or woodwork.

That's just what I was thinking nap queen. Get them in to do the more difficult jobs and we can just paint the walls. Even if it was cut down to 6 days it would be 780 which doesn't seem too bad. Painting a freshly painted wall wouldn't be too much work.
One of the rooms is going to be the kids playroom so to be honest I'm tempted to just not paint it at all as I'm sure it'll get drawn on!

£130 a day is a pretty good rate for a decorator. Whether 8 days is excessive I don’t know. We paid £700 for two rooms and all doors in the house last year (including materials).

We have painted our own fresh plaster. It takes ages and is horrid cause fresh plaster soaks the paint up and you end up with an uneven finish really easily. If you can afford it, palm the work off to some else. You will get a better result far quicker. Doing about 4/5 coats (2 X undercoat and 2 X top coat) is boring.

PLFDiDi that's a good point...we'd probably only get the time reduced by two days at most so is it worth 260 quid or should we just bite the bullet and pay for it to get it all done...