When is it too cold to paint outside?
If the overnight low is 35 degrees or under, your exterior doesn’t get painted that day.
35°F
The overnight low. Not the high while the crew is there.
Under that and the job moves to the next workable day.
Why the overnight low and not the afternoon?
Paint keeps curing for hours after the crew packs up. A nice afternoon followed by a hard freeze can wreck a coat that looked fine at five o’clock, and nobody finds out for months. By then it’s on your house.
So the forecast we watch is tonight, not today. A 55 degree afternoon with a 32 degree night isn’t an exterior day.
What else moves the window?
- The surface, not the air
- A north wall in the shade can sit well below what your phone says, and a south wall in the sun well above it. The paint only knows what the siding under it is doing.
- Wet siding, up to a point
- Rain stops a day. Damp doesn’t. As long as there’s no water running down the siding, it can be painted, so a heavy dew in October is usually a late start rather than a lost day.
What that means for your job
Through a Kansas City winter the weather sets the calendar, not us. If the nights aren’t there, the job moves. Worth asking any painter: what happens to my job if the weather turns?
If you’re reading this in the cold half of the year, two things are worth knowing. Getting the price settled now costs nothing, and it’s easier to pick a week in spring before the spring rush picks it for you.
A cold month is interior season
Interiors, cabinets, trim and ceilings all run the same in January as in June. If the outside has to wait, that’s usually the part of the list to do first.
What it costs to paint the inside of a house: $3,400 to $7,100.
The other thing worth reading on a cold morning is how an exterior job runs, since weather sits across every step of it.
Ask us about the weather window
Tell us what you want painted and when you were hoping to have it done. We’ll tell you straight whether the season works.