Painting, Decorating & Finishing in the Thousand Islands

What we paint

We cover the whole house, inside and out. Interior painting is walls, ceilings, trim, doors and the patch-and-prep that comes before it. Exterior painting and staining is siding, trim, porches, decks and the weathered river homes that take a beating from sun and wind off the water.

The two jobs people most often ask about by name are cabinet painting and refinishing, and fine finish work. Cabinet refinishing gives a tired kitchen a new look for a fraction of new cabinets, and it pairs naturally with a kitchen remodel if you're already in there. Fine finish covers the slow, careful stuff: stain and clear coats on doors and trim, built-ins, anything where the finish is the whole point and a brush mark shows.

How we work, and why prep is most of it

Cheap paint jobs fail at the prep, not the paint. So that's where we spend the time. Inside, that means filling and sanding, caulking gaps, priming bare spots and masking off everything that isn't getting painted. We move and cover furniture, run drop cloths, and keep the dust down.

Outside, prep is even bigger. We scrape and sand failing paint, wash off the chalk and mildew that build up near the water, set nail pops and reset loose trim, then prime bare wood before any color goes on. Paint laid over a bad surface peels in a season or two no matter how good the product is.

We work in order, cut clean lines by hand instead of leaning on tape alone, and walk the job with you at the end so the touch-ups get caught before we pack up, not after.

Colors, sheens and finishes

Picking color is the fun part and the part people get stuck on. We'll bring it back to the practical: how the room's used, how the light hits it, and which sheen makes sense. Flat hides wall flaws but scuffs easy. Eggshell and satin wipe down better for kitchens, baths and hallways. Trim and doors usually want a harder semi-gloss.

For stain and clear work we match to the wood and the look you're after, from a natural oil finish that lets the grain show to a solid stain that evens everything out. We use good paint and stain because the cheap stuff costs more in the end, and we'll tell you where a premium product earns its price and where it doesn't.

Built for the river

Exterior paint up here lives a hard life. Summer sun comes off the St. Lawrence twice, straight down and bounced up off the water, so south- and west-facing walls fade and chalk fast. Then winter swings the wood through freeze and thaw for months. A finish that holds in the suburbs downstate won't always make it on a lake-facing wall.

So we prep for it. We wash off the mildew and chalk that grow in the damp, scrape and spot-prime the failing spots, and use exterior coatings rated for this kind of sun and weather. Timing matters too. We get exterior work in during the stretch of dry, warm-enough days the North Country actually gives us, not when the dew won't burn off or the temperature's about to drop overnight.

A lot of these are cottages that sit empty half the year, so we can paint the outside in the off-season and have it done before the owners are back on the water.

What it costs

We quote painting on-site because the price rides on the prep, not the square footage alone. What moves the number is how much patching, scraping and priming the surfaces need, how many coats the color change takes, ceiling height and trim detail inside, and the condition of the wood outside.

A clean repaint of sound walls sits at the low end. A heavily weathered exterior that needs serious scraping and priming, or cabinet refinishing where every door and box gets stripped and recoated, runs higher because that's hours of careful work. We walk the job, lay out the options, and give you one written quote. No surprise line items after the fact.