A wide shot from every doorway
Standing in the door gets the room size, the wall count, and everything that has to be masked, moved, or worked around.
For painting companies
Quoting and job management software for painting businesses
Paint is the cheap part. The price is prep, openings, and how many times you have to go around the room. Mason asks about all three, prices from your sheet, and says so out loud when the photos cannot settle the prep.
Join the waitlistWhat painting customers get asked
Questions a customer answers by counting.
Wall area is not what makes a painting day long. Doors, windows, corners, and cut lines are, and a homeowner can count every one of them from the middle of the room — see how the quote gets built.
- 01
Which rooms, and what is in each one?
Count the doors, the windows, and the closets room by room. A small bedroom with three doors and two closets is a longer day than a big empty dining room, and square footage will never tell you that.
- 02
Walls only, or ceilings and trim as well?
Three separate prices. Ceilings are slower than walls and trim is slower than both. Plenty of customers say paint the room and mean the walls.
- 03
How big a color change?
White going dark, or a strong color going light, means primer and a full second coat everywhere. The same color again may not. Coats are a multiplier on the entire job.
- 04
What is on the walls now — flat, gloss, or wallpaper?
Gloss has to be dulled before anything sticks to it. Wallpaper is not a paint job at all until it is off the wall.
- 05
How tall are the ceilings, and is there a stairwell?
Eight feet is a ladder. A two-story entry, a wall over the stairs, or a vaulted great room is staging, and staging is its own day and its own line.
- 06
Will the rooms be empty, and who is moving the furniture?
Masking, moving, and covering are hours that never show up in wall area. On an occupied house they can be most of the morning.
- 07
Any stains, cracks, holes, or popped nails? Photograph each one.
Patching is a trade inside your day. A ceiling stain also means finding out what leaked before anybody primes over it and owns it.
- 08
Outside: what is the siding, and how much is peeling?
Wood, fiber cement, vinyl, brick, or stucco changes the coating and how far a gallon goes. A patch of failure on one gable is not the same job as a whole south wall letting go.
- 09
What year was the house built?
Pre-1978 homes and any suspected lead coating go to your company’s certified lead-safe process and review. Mason does not automatically price scraping or sanding when lead risk is possible.
The photos that matter for painting
What the camera has to catch.
Mason asks for one shot at a time, with an example, and asks again when a photo comes back too dark or too far away. Surface condition is the whole estimate, so the close-ups are not optional.
Photograph from the floor and from the ground. No ladders, no scaffolds, nobody on a roof.
Down the wall, with the light raking across it
Shoot along the surface, not straight at it. Raking light is the only way a phone shows old patches, roller stipple, and waves that will telegraph through a fresh coat.
Every stain, crack, and hole, up close
With a hand or a key in frame for scale. A hairline crack and a quarter-inch gap are two different repairs and two different prices.
The trim and the door casing, close
Paint built up in the profile, caulk pulling away from the wall, dents at the bottom of the casing. Trim condition decides whether you are coating it or rebuilding it.
One shot per exterior wall, from well back
The whole elevation in the frame. This is where your body square footage comes from, and a cropped wall gets a cropped quote.
The worst peeling area, close
This photo can suggest whether the job may need wash and coat, spot scrape and prime, or a fuller prep. It cannot decide how far the failure runs, so your team confirms the prep tier.
The bottom of the siding and the trim boards
Rot starts at the ground and at the bottom of a trim board. If it is soft down there, it is not a paint job yet.
The ground around the house
Beds, bushes tight to the wall, the AC unit, the slope on the back side. It shows where a ladder can stand and where nothing can.
The leftover paint can, if there is one
The label gives the sheen, the color, and often the product. Ten seconds for the customer, one less phone call for you.
How painting quotes get priced
Openings, edges, and the prep under the peel.
Mason prices in the units your sheet already uses, and it treats prep as its own decision instead of burying it in a rate.
| Unit | What it prices |
|---|---|
| Per room | The fast way to price a repaint when the rooms are standard and the prep tier is known. |
| Per square foot of wall | Odd or oversized rooms. Ceilings get their own rate because they are slower than walls. |
| Each opening | Doors and windows. A door is two faces, a jamb, and casing — which is why it prices as a unit and not as area. |
| Linear foot | Base, crown, chair rail, handrail, and exterior trim runs. |
| Prep tier | Wash only, spot scrape and prime, or full scrape and prime. Your tiers, in your words, at your numbers. |
| Coats | A multiplier on everything above. Primer counts as a coat when it is doing real work. |
| Per gallon at your spread rate | Materials. Stucco, rough cedar, and block drink far more per gallon than smooth drywall, so equal wall area is not equal material cost. |
| Hours | Masking, moving, covering, and protecting. That is time, not area, and it belongs on the sheet as time. |
| Day rate | Lifts and staging for anything over a stairwell, over a roof, or above the second floor. |
| Minimum charge | The floor under a small job, so a two-hour call does not get priced like one. |
Site conditions move the number inside those units: texture on the walls, how many cut lines a room really has, a house that has to stay lived in, wind on an exterior day, and how much of the work is above ladder height. Crews that also stain fences and decks or came up through exterior restoration keep a separate sheet for each, and Mason keeps the questions separate too.
The honest part
What no photo settles.
A standard interior repaint is one of the few jobs in the trades that really can be priced from photos. The moment prep is in question, it cannot be, and Mason is built to say which one it is looking at.
How far the scraper goes
A photo shows that paint is failing. It cannot show where the failing stops. Prep is the biggest number on an exterior and the one no camera has ever settled.
What is under the current coat
Oil under latex, or latex over chalk, changes what will bond. That takes a test patch and a hand on the wall, not a picture of it.
Water and what it left behind
Blistering low on a wall usually means water is getting in from somewhere. Trim that photographs fine can still take a screwdriver. Coating over either is money thrown at a wall.
What is behind the wallpaper
One corner pulled tells you whether it comes off in sheets or takes the drywall face with it. Nobody on earth knows before that corner comes up.
Cabinets and stained woodwork
Refinishing gets graded with a hand on the door and a look at the grain. Those come back to you as a visit, every time.
Older houses
Mason asks the year the house was built. Pre-1978 homes and any suspected lead coating go to your company’s certified lead-safe process and review rather than automatic pricing.
Illustrative example
Three bedrooms and a hallway · walls only · same color
- Counted from photos
- Four spaces, nine doors, six windows, eight-foot ceilings, furniture staying in the rooms.
- Prep tier confirmed
- Fill nail holes and spot-patch. No wallpaper, no gloss, no ceiling stains.
- Mason's answer
- An exact quote, built from your per-room price, your per-opening price, and your masking hours.
- What would have changed it
- Peeling paint, a stain on a ceiling, a wall over the stairs, or a color change big enough to need primer.
What painting jobs need on the calendar
What actually decides the painting schedule.
Coming soonBooking, room order, and moving an exterior day off the rain are not built yet. When they are, they will sit with the quote instead of on a whiteboard — see where scheduling is headed.
- 01
The can sets the pace
Recoat times are printed on the label, and they stretch in cold or humid air. You can push a crew. You cannot push dry time.
- 02
Exteriors run on temperature and dew
Below the product's minimum surface temperature the coat never forms properly, and late in the afternoon dew lands on a coat that is not ready. Both ends of the day are shorter than the daylight.
- 03
Rain inside the window ruins the coat
Exterior days need a look-ahead and a bail-out plan, and somebody has to call the customer before they hear the thunder.
- 04
Prep is its own day
Scrape, sand, patch, caulk, prime. Patch has to dry before it gets sanded. Squeezing prep and finish into one day is how call-backs get made.
- 05
Occupied houses set the room order
A dining room can sit taped for two days. A kitchen and a kid's bedroom cannot. Room order is a conversation with the customer, not a routing problem.
- 06
Two painters in a bedroom is the ceiling
Adding people means opening more rooms, which means more masking. It does not make one room go faster.
- 07
On remodels you sit between two other trades
Drywall ahead of you, flooring and final trim behind you. When their dates slip, yours slips, and nobody calls to tell you.
- 08
Wood has to dry before stain
After a wash, a deck or a fence waits for the wood to come back down before anything goes on it. That wait is a day on the calendar, not a gap in it.
- 09
The exterior season is short
Interiors carry the cold months. The board looks nothing alike in February and June, and the crew you need is not the same size either.
01Can Mason quote an exterior?
On sound siding with a prep tier your company has confirmed, yes. On a wall that is letting go, or when pre-1978 or suspected lead coating is involved, it sends the job to your review. It will not guess how far a scrape runs.
02How do prep tiers work?
You define them once, in your own words and your own prices — wash only, spot scrape and prime, full scrape and prime. Mason asks the questions and requests the photos that pick a tier. When the photos do not settle it, Mason does not pick one; the job comes to you or the customer gets a range.
03Do I have to price by the square foot?
No. Per room, per opening, per linear foot of trim, per gallon at your spread rate, an hourly line for masking, a minimum charge. Whatever your sheet already does, Mason reads it and you confirm what it found before a single quote goes out.
04What about cabinets and woodwork?
Those come back to you. Cabinet and stained-woodwork refinishing gets graded by hand, and no photo replaces standing in the kitchen.