On time every day, and the house cleaned up every evening.

What the reviews actually say about working inside

Interior work is personal. Somebody is living in the rooms, the furniture is theirs, and they see every edge for years afterward. So before saying anything about how we do it, here is what people who hired us wrote. Daniel Elliot, whose whole apartment we painted, put it this way: "They were on time everyday, communicated the process throughout and cleaned up after themselves."

Denise Americanos-Gkaravelis wrote that Alban "was organized and cleaned up the property each evening" and "kept in communication throughout the entire process." Robert Locascio kept it short: "did a very good job on time and cleaned up very well". Those are three different customers in three different years saying the same two things, on time and cleaned up.

James Bailey wrote something we think about on every job: a painter who "doesn't leave the job until the customer's happy". That is the walk through at the end. You point, we fix it while the paint is still open, and nobody packs up until you are done pointing.

• Furniture pulled to the middle and covered, floors protected
• Plates, vent covers and hardware off and bagged by room
• Holes and dings filled, sanded flat and spot primed
• Two coats, cut in by hand at the ceiling and the trim
• Tools packed and the room swept before we leave for the day

Prep is most of the work and most of the price

A good interior job is mostly things you never see in the finished room. Furniture comes to the center and gets covered. Floors get dropped. Switch plates, outlet covers and vent grilles come off, because cutting around a plate leaves an edge you notice every time you flip the light on.

Then the walls get a hard look. Nail holes, the dent where a chair back hit the wall, the hairline along a drywall seam, the slick spot where somebody scrubbed a mark off with cleaner. All of it gets filled, sanded flat and spot primed. Bare filler drinks paint at a different rate than the wall around it, and an unprimed patch reads as a dull shape when light rakes across it.

Covering a deep color, a red, or a stain from water or smoke gets its own primer coat. Burying it under extra finish coats costs more and works worse. That is how a do it yourself room ends up on coat four and still looking blotchy.

Picking the sheen for each room

Sheen is how much the dried paint shines, and it changes both how a wall looks and how it wears. Flat hides bumps and old patches better than anything, so it belongs on ceilings and on walls that have been repaired a few times. It does not like being wiped. Rub a flat wall with a rag and you leave a shiny burnish mark.

Eggshell and satin can take a wipe, so they go where hands go. Hallways, kids' rooms, the family room. Kitchens, baths and laundry rooms want a step higher because of steam and splashes. Trim and doors go higher still so they stay hard and clean easily.

More sheen shows more wall, so a glossy finish on a wavy old wall shows every wave. We walk the rooms with you, say what we would put where, and write it on the estimate by name instead of deciding it later with a roller already loaded.

Ceilings, cut lines and Pinellas texture

The line where wall meets ceiling is the first thing anybody's eye lands on. It gets cut by hand with a brush. Tape has its uses, and on knockdown or orange peel texture it is not one of them. Paint bleeds under the edge and leaves a worse line than a steady hand.

Most ceilings in Largo and Clearwater homes carry knockdown, orange peel, or popcorn from the sixties and seventies. Texture drinks paint, so a textured ceiling takes more material than a smooth one, and it wants rolling in a single direction across the room so lap lines do not show up under the fixture at night.

Trim, casing and doors come last so nothing already finished gets bumped. A door painted while hanging picks up a run along the bottom edge that you feel every time you close it, so doors come off the hinges and get done flat where it makes sense.

Color advice, and Florida light

William Galvin wrote that we "gave me great advice on colors super fast too". Color is where most people freeze, and it is where a second opinion from somebody who has watched a lot of colors dry on a lot of walls saves you a repaint.

Light here is stronger and warmer than the light a paint chip was made for. It bounces off white tile floors and comes in through a screened lanai, and a gray that felt soft in the store can go blue on a wall facing the pool. Look at the color on the actual wall at the hour you are usually in the room. A big sample beats a small one, and a color you saw once in the morning is a color you have not really seen.

If you have a color already, bring the lid or a chip and it can be matched. A match pulled off an old wall is never exact because the wall has faded, so we show you the match before anybody buys paint.