Interior Repaint of a Whole House in Studio City

The property

A two-storey single-family home in Studio City, built in 1994, occupied throughout the job. Around 2,600 square feet of walls, ceilings, hallways, closets, three bathrooms and all the interior trim. The family stayed in the house while we worked, which changes how you sequence everything.

What the client asked for

They asked for the whole house to be repainted in one warm off-white so the rooms would read as one continuous space instead of the six different colours the previous owner had left behind. The brief was explicitly about the finish quality: no roller marks, no picture-framing at the corners, and no paint on the floors or hardware.

What we found that the client did not expect

Three separate problems that no amount of paint would have hidden. The previous coat was a low-grade flat that had been applied over a glossy builder finish with no primer, so it was already chalking and coming away when we tested it with tape. The hallway and stairwell had nail pops and hairline cracks along most of the drywall seams from normal seasonal movement. And two of the bathrooms had been painted with a wall paint rather than a moisture-tolerant finish, so the paint above the shower had gone soft. If we had simply painted over all of that, the new coat would have looked excellent for about a year.

How we worked, in order

1. Full masking and containment first. Floors covered, hardware removed rather than taped where possible, fixtures and vanities sheeted, and the working room isolated from the rest of the house each day so the family could live normally.
2. Tested adhesion of the existing coat room by room and stripped back the areas that failed.
3. Repaired the substrate: nail pops set and refilled, seam cracks cut out, taped and refloated, then sanded flat.
4. Spot-primed all repairs, then applied a bonding primer over the chalking and glossy areas. Paint over a chalking surface has nothing to grip.
5. Caulked all trim, door casing and base junctions so there are no dark shadow lines left in the corners.
6. Ceilings first, then walls, then trim and doors, working top down room by room. Two full finish coats on the walls, three where we were covering a dark colour.
7. Moisture-tolerant finish in the bathrooms instead of the same wall paint used everywhere else.
8. Reinstalled hardware, cleaned, and walked each room with the client under both daylight and lamplight before we called it done.

The decision we are proud of

Spending the first two days on adhesion testing and priming rather than painting. It is the least visible money in the whole job and it is the reason the finish will still be tight in five years. The alternative, which is what the previous painter did, is to spray a fresh coat straight over a glossy or chalking surface. It looks flawless on the last day. Then it starts peeling in sheets around the wet areas and lifting with the tape every time a picture hook comes out, and the only honest repair is to strip and start again. Paint is a system, not a colour.

One detail worth noting

We removed door hardware and switch plates instead of masking them. It is slower, and it is the difference between a repaint and a paint job. Taped hardware always leaves a ridge of paint at the edge, and that ridge is the first thing the eye finds on a door you touch every day.