Getting your home ready before the painters arrive is easy to underestimate. A bit of preparation on your end saves time, protects your belongings, and lets the team start efficiently — instead of spending the first hour clearing a path and moving furniture.
Here’s exactly what you should do — and what you don’t need to worry about — before a professional painting team arrives at your Bankstown home.
What’s Your Job vs What’s the Painter’s Job
Let’s be clear about the division of responsibility. A professional painting team will:
- Lay drop sheets over floors before any work begins
- Mask and protect windows, skirting boards, power points, and trims
- Cover or move heavy furniture that can’t reasonably be cleared from the room
- Sand, clean, fill, and prime surfaces as part of their preparation process
- Clean the worksite at the end of every day
Your responsibilities are:
- Removing personal items, valuables, and fragile objects from the work areas
- Clearing access paths through the home or around the exterior
- Arranging parking if your street has permit restrictions
- Managing pets on painting days
- Temporarily relocating items that can’t be left in painting rooms
Interior Preparation — Room by Room
Living Areas and Bedrooms
Take down any artwork, mirrors, or photos hung on walls. Remove curtains — paint fumes and overspray will permeate fabric if it’s left in place during an interior job. Move small furniture items (lamps, side tables, ornaments, chairs) to a different room or corridor.
Large items like sofas, beds, and wardrobes don’t need to be removed from the room — a professional team will move and cover them — but clearing smaller items and pushing large furniture away from walls genuinely speeds up the process and gives painters better working access.
Kitchens
Clear benchtops and remove any wall-mounted items — utensil rails, small shelves, hooks. The painter will mask appliances and cabinetry, but cleared benchtops give them proper working room and avoid accidental overspray on your kitchen equipment.
Bathrooms
Remove towel rails, toilet roll holders, and any wall-mounted accessories if possible — these are simple to unscrew and will be reattached after the paint dries. Leaving them in place means the painter has to mask around them, which gives a less clean finish around fittings than painting the full wall surface first.
Exterior Preparation
Clear the Perimeter
Move pot plants, outdoor furniture, hoses, and decorative items away from walls being painted. If you have garden beds directly against the house, let the painter know — a professional team will lay drop sheets over plants and beds, but clear access to the perimeter of the home makes the job faster and safer.
Gate and Side Access
Make sure side gates and rear access are unlocked on the first morning. Painters working on full exterior jobs need to move ladders, equipment, and materials around the property. A locked gate on day one wastes time and creates frustration before the job has even started.
Move Cars
Move vehicles out of the driveway and away from the work area on exterior painting days. Overspray from exterior work can travel further than expected — particularly in light wind. A car parked in the driveway directly below where painting is happening is an avoidable risk. Park it a few houses down on active painting days.
Pets and Children
For interior jobs, keep pets in a secure room away from the active painting area. Dogs and cats can wander into fresh paint, track footprints, or knock over equipment and open paint tins. For exterior jobs on homes with dogs, keep them in a section of the yard that isn’t being worked on.
For children, the main consideration during interior painting is air quality in the short term. Icon Touch uses quality interior products including Dulux low-VOC ranges, which significantly reduce fume levels compared to older-formula paints. Even so, keeping young children out of freshly painted rooms until the first coat has dried and the room has ventilated is good practice.
Parking for the Painting Team
In areas of Bankstown with permit parking or very limited street space, check with the painter how many vehicles the team will have and whether they need parking directly outside. A professional painting team arriving to find no parking within a reasonable distance loses meaningful time before the first brush stroke.
Don’t Bother Washing the Walls Yourself
This is the most common thing homeowners do unnecessarily before painters arrive. Surface preparation — cleaning, sanding, washing, filling — is part of what you’re paying a professional team to do. Don’t spend your weekend on it. The only exception is an extreme situation with genuine health hazards, like severe black mould, where a head-start removal makes sense.
Do This One Thing Before Work Starts
Walk through every area with the painter on the first morning. Point out any concerns — a crack you’ve been watching, a water stain that reappears every winter, a section that peeled last time. It takes ten minutes and makes sure nothing important gets overlooked.
At Icon Touch, we do a walk-through on every job before we start. If you’ve noticed something specific you want us to pay attention to, we want to know about it. Our interior painting services and exterior painting services in Bankstown are built around clear communication from day one.
Get in touch today if you’d like to know more about what to expect before your job begins.
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