Free Painting Tools
Seven things you can work out yourself before you speak to anybody. Upload a photo and try colors on your own walls, get a cost range, work out how much paint you need. Nothing asks for your email and nothing you upload leaves your phone.
See your own room in a new color
Upload a photo of a room, or the front of the house, and tap a wall. The color goes on but the shadows stay, so it looks like the wall really is that color rather than a flat shape pasted on top. Your photo stays on your phone. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Take one on your phone, or drag a picture in here.
1. What are you painting?
2. Pick a color
3. Touch it up
Mouse or finger: tap the picture where you want the color. Keyboard: tab to the picture, move the marker with the arrow keys, then press Enter to put the color on. Every step works either way, and nothing here needs dragging.
Choose a photo to begin.
These colors are ours, mixed to match at the store. Whatever you land on, Fred can match it in Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore. Bring the saved picture to your estimate.
What is this likely to cost?
A real range from jobs like yours in Northern Virginia. It is a ballpark, not a quote: Fred measures the actual house and puts a fixed number in writing at no charge.
Ten percent off for veterans and anyone 65 or older. Get the real number free.
How much paint will it take?
Measure the room and this works out the gallons, including the second coat. Useful whether we are doing it or you are.
Which finish for which room?
Sheen is the choice people get wrong most often, and it is the one that decides whether a wall can be wiped clean or shows every roller mark. Pick the room and the surface.
When is the best time to book?
Northern Virginia has a real season for outside work and none at all for inside work. Every month below says how good it is, in words as well as color.
Is your house due?
Roughly how long a finish lasts around here, given what it is on and which way it faces.
Getting ready for the crew
Nothing here is required, and we will do any of it for you. It just makes the first morning faster, and a faster first morning is a cheaper job.
Why these exist
Most painting company websites give you one thing to do: fill in a form and wait for a call. That is fine once you have decided, but it is useless while you are still working out whether you can afford it, what color you want, or whether the job is even worth doing this year.
These tools answer the questions people actually call us with, without anybody having to pick up the phone. If they save you a call, good. If they help you decide it is not the right year, that is fine too, and we would rather you found that out in five minutes than after a week of quotes.
None of them ask for your name or your email. The color visualizer runs entirely inside your browser, so the photo of your living room never gets uploaded to us or anybody else. There is no account, no trial, and nothing is stored.
What the cost tool is doing
The range you get is built from what jobs like yours have actually cost in this area, adjusted for how much prep the surfaces need and whether there is repair work involved. It is deliberately a range rather than a number, because a house is not a spreadsheet.
Where the estimate can be wrong is exactly where an estimate from anybody would be wrong: things you cannot see from where you are standing. Rot behind a gutter. A ceiling that has been painted over a water stain three times. Wallpaper that turns out to have been hung straight onto unprimed drywall. Those change the number, and no online tool can know about them.
What we do is walk the job, find those things, and put a fixed written price on the whole scope before anything starts. If we open something up and find rot that nobody could have seen, you get a written price for that piece before we touch it. The number on the estimate is the number on the invoice.
The color visualizer, and what it can and cannot tell you
Point your phone at a wall, take a photo, upload it, and tap the wall. The tool works out where that surface ends and lays the color over it while keeping the original shadows, so a wall that was darker under the window stays darker under the window. That is the difference between something that looks like your room painted, and something that looks like a colored rectangle stuck on a photograph.
Be honest with yourself about what a screen can do. Your phone camera adjusts white balance, your screen has its own color cast, and the light in the room changes everything between morning and evening. A visualizer gets you from two hundred possibilities down to three or four. It cannot get you from four down to one.
For that last step there is no substitute for a sample on the actual wall. Paint a two foot square, or get a large peel-and-stick sample, and look at it at breakfast, in the afternoon, and under the lamps at night. Colors that look identical on a screen can be obviously different on a wall, particularly grays and off-whites, which shift toward green, purple or pink depending on what light is hitting them.
The colors in the tool are our own palette. When you pick one, we take the reference to Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore and have it matched, so you are not tied to a brand and you are not paying extra for a name.
The paint quantity calculator
Straightforward arithmetic that people get wrong constantly, usually by forgetting the second coat or by not subtracting the doors and windows.
It works on 350 square feet of wall per gallon, which is a realistic figure for a roller on a primed, previously painted wall. It comes out lower on bare drywall, on anything textured, and on a deep color going over a light one. It comes out higher on a very smooth wall with a good roller.
Buy a little more than the number says and keep what is left. A sealed can of the same batch is worth having for touch-ups two years later, and a re-mixed can is never quite the same, even from the same formula.
Sheen, which is where most people go wrong
Color is the decision everybody agonizes over. Sheen is the decision that actually determines whether you are happy with the wall in two years, and most people never think about it at all.
Sheen is how much light the dried paint bounces back, from flat through matte, eggshell, satin, semi-gloss and gloss. The higher the sheen, the tougher and more washable the surface, and the more it shows every imperfection underneath it.
That trade is the whole thing. A flat ceiling hides forty years of drywall joins. Put satin on that same ceiling and you will see every one of them. Semi-gloss trim wipes clean when a child runs a hand along it. Flat trim in the same spot is marked for good.
The tool gives you what we would use in each room and, more usefully, why. If you disagree with it, that is fine, but at least you will be disagreeing on purpose.
Timing, and why it matters more here than people expect
Northern Virginia has a genuine exterior painting season and a genuine off season, and a coat applied outside that window never fully cures.
Paint needs the surface to be above about fifty degrees and it needs the temperature to stay there while it cures, which is longer than it takes to dry. It also needs the wood to be dry, so two clear days after rain, not two hours. And it needs the humidity to be low enough that the film can release its water rather than sitting damp on the wall.
The month chart shows all of that in one glance for each type of work. The other thing it shows is when we are busy, which matters to you: the best months are the months everybody books, so the way to get the dates you want in May is to call in February.
The one you should run before you call anybody
The last two tools are the ones we would point a stranger at first.
"Is your house due" takes what the surface is and which way it faces, and tells you roughly where you are in its life. Sun is the biggest factor by a distance. A south facing wall in full sun can burn through a finish in five years while the shaded north side of the same house still looks acceptable at twelve. Most people repaint the whole house on the schedule of whichever elevation they look at most.
The prep checklist is the least exciting thing on this page and the one that saves the most money. None of it is required, and we will do all of it if you would rather, but the first morning of a job is when time gets wasted, and a room that is already cleared is a room we can start in.
Common questions
Does the color visualizer upload my photo anywhere?
No. It runs entirely inside your browser using your phone or computer, and the picture never gets sent to us or to any other service. If you close the page it is gone. There is no account and nothing is stored.
How accurate are the colors on my screen?
Close enough to shortlist, not close enough to commit. Screens vary, phone cameras adjust white balance on their own, and room light changes a color through the day. Use the tool to get down to three or four, then put a real sample on the wall.
Are these real paint colors I can buy?
They are our own palette rather than a manufacturer catalogue, which means no licensing and no brand lock-in. Pick one and we take the reference to Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore and have it matched. Any decent paint store can match a color.
Is the cost estimate a quote?
No, and it never becomes one. It is a range built from comparable jobs in this area so you know roughly what you are dealing with. A real number needs somebody to walk the house, and Fred does that free and puts it in writing.
Why does the visualizer sometimes grab the wrong bit of the photo?
It follows color, so a wall that runs into a similarly colored ceiling can bleed across. Use the slider to make it grab less, tap the individual sections separately, or switch to the brush and paint the area by hand. Erase takes back anything it took too much of.
Will it work on a photo of the outside of my house?
Yes, and that is often more useful than an interior. Take it on an overcast day if you can. Flat light means fewer hard shadows for the tool to trip over, and it is closer to how the color will read most of the time anyway.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Everything on this page runs in a normal web browser on a phone, tablet or computer. There is nothing to download, no signup, and no email required at any point.
Can I bring my saved picture to the estimate?
Please do. Save the picture from the visualizer and show it to Fred when he comes out. It is much easier to talk about a color you are both looking at than one you are both describing.
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Ready when you are.
Fred answers his own phone. If he is up a ladder he calls back the same evening.