Exterior paint costs in Hartford

Walk the older blocks of Hartford and you'll see two kinds of walls. The National Register nomination for the Allen Place-Lincoln Street Historic District describes the typical house there as wood frame, often with clapboards on the first floor and shingles on the second, two front doors and a two-story front porch. Mixed in are brick buildings, including the Perfect Six, which the nomination calls a widely occurring Hartford type: three stories of brick with two apartments on each floor.

Those two walls make two very different paint jobs. On a frame two-family, you're painting everything: clapboards, shingles, stacked porches, every rail and post. On a Perfect Six, the brick stays brick, and the job is the wood around it: windows, doors, porches and cornice.

Count on frost to bracket the season. The NOAA station for Hartford still sees freezing nights in April and gets them back in October, about 131 in all over a typical year. Paint wants mild nights as well as mild days, so the dependable stretch is shorter than the calendar suggests.

If you're pricing a frame two-family, count the porches as part of the job, not an extra. Two stacked porches add a lot of rails, posts and ceiling to paint.