So you’d love to paint your house, but you can’t afford to hire professionals and you don’t want to spend hours making multiple trips to the paint store because you forgot dropcloths, or a trim brush, or painters’ tape, or any of the other myriad supplies you’ll need for a DIY job.
The on-demand professional painting service Paintzen feels your pain, no pun intended, and has a solution: A variation on its service that provides everything but the hired guns to do the work. Provide the dimensions of the room(s) you want to paint, chose a shade from the Benjamin Moore palette of 3500 colors and five finishes, and Paintzen will compute how much paint you’ll need and suggest all the tools and supplies you might need to do the job yourself. You’ll also get step-by-step tutorial videos showing you techniques to get professional-quality results.
The service is available in major markets including the New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C. metropolitan areas. Orders are filled by local Benjamin Moore dealers to guarantee delivery in 24 hours or less, the company says.
“Painting is one of the easiest, most cost-effective ways to transform and personalize a space,” said Paintzen co-founder and CEO Mike Russell. “Our DIY Program equips customers with everything they need to easily achieve professional results at just a fraction of the cost. You just tell us what you want to paint, and we’ll make sure you have all the tools you need to create your own live-in masterpiece.”
Why this matters: If you put stock in Yelp reviews, most Paintzen customers have a high opinion of its existing professional service. And if you’ve ever tackled a home-painting job on your own, you know how easy it is to under- or overestimate how much paint you’ll need, which tools you’ll need, and which supplies the job will call for. Going back and forth to the store to buy more of any of it can quickly turn a quick-and-easy job into an ordeal.
One possible pitfall with Paintzen’s service: Choosing paint colors online. The colors you see on your computer monitor aren’t always 100-percent accurate; heck, paint colors frequently look very different on the wall than they do on the physical paint swatch. Apart from that, Paintzen’s DIY service sounds pretty cool.