Commercial painting in Bellingham

What commercial painting costs in Bellingham

Office and retail repaints in Bellingham run $2.20 to $6.60 per square foot. That is the working range for interior commercial work here, and where a specific building lands is decided before anybody opens a can.

Near $2.20: an open floor plate, 9 to 10 foot ceilings, sound drywall, one or two colors, your people moving the furniture, and daytime access.

Near $6.60: partitioned suites with heavy cut-in, exposed deck and structure, mixed substrates inside one scope, night or weekend work, and prep that involves patching, block filler, or removing a coating before the new one goes on.

Square foot pricing on commercial usually means floor area rather than wall area, so define that in the scope before bids go out. A 3,000 square foot suite chopped into offices has far more wall than a 3,000 square foot open floor, and a bid quoted on floor area has to account for that difference somewhere.

Specialty and exterior items get priced separately. Washing starts at $0.30 per square foot. A restaurant patio deck restained runs $770 to $2,000 for a standard deck. Break room or reception millwork sprayed starts at $85 per door. Details are on the commercial painting page.

Commercial painting price ranges in Bellingham, WA

Access and prep set the number, so night work, partitioned floor plates and multiple substrates inside one scope push a Bellingham job toward the top of the range.

The buildings we work on in Bellingham

Bellingham commercial property falls into a few groups, and each one takes a different coating conversation.

Downtown and Fairhaven masonry

The downtown core grew in two waves, roughly 1882 to 1900 on railroad speculation and then 1900 to 1915 after the four towns merged into Bellingham in 1903. Buildings from that second wave are multi-story masonry in native Chuckanut sandstone and brick from local brickyards, with reinforced concrete arriving in the early 1900s. The dominant form is the two-part commercial block, retail at street level with offices or apartments above.

Fairhaven is tighter and older. The historic district covers about three and a quarter blocks with 13 primary buildings, most of them from 1888 to 1904. Brick is the common material, and many of those walls are frame construction faced with brick rather than solid masonry. Sandstone shows up as trim in lintels and archivolts.

That history matters for one specific reason. Painting historic brick and sandstone is close to permanent. A film-forming coating on soft old brick traps moisture inside a wall that was built to breathe, and in a city that takes about 36 inches of rain a year that moisture has to go somewhere. Spalled brick faces and blown mortar joints are the result, and stripping paint back off historic masonry costs multiples of what putting it on cost. On those buildings the paint scope is normally storefronts, cornices, window sash and doors, with the masonry left alone or handed to a masonry specialist.

The commercial areas east and north

Along Bakerview, through Irongate, and out around Barkley and Cordata the stock changes completely. Concrete tilt-up, CMU block, pre-engineered metal and EIFS. Those take conventional commercial coatings, and the prep questions are about chalking, adhesion of the prior coating, and the condition of joint sealant rather than historic fabric.

Multi-tenant strip retail sits between the two. Wood or hardboard fascia, metal canopies, painted CMU on the side and rear walls, and whatever the last three tenants did to the storefront.

Working around your hours

The scheduling question decides more of your price than the paint does.

Daytime work in an empty suite is the cheapest way to buy commercial painting. Every step away from that adds cost: occupied space, after hours, weekends only, and short overnight windows in a building that has to open at 7 a.m.

For occupied space the coatings are low-odor and low-VOC so staff and customers are back in the room the next morning without complaint. Industrial urethanes are available where a surface needs them, and those get scheduled into windows when the space is empty.

Items to settle before the first night:

• Who holds keys, alarm codes and after hours elevator access, and what happens if an alarm trips at 2 a.m.
• Where material and equipment stage overnight, and whether that space locks.
• What has to be back in service by open, named down to specific rooms and doors.
• Whether the HVAC runs overnight, because a building on night setback dries paint slowly.

That last one is worth pressing on in a Bellingham winter. Buildings on night setback drop to 60 degrees or below while outdoor humidity sits above 80 percent, and waterborne coatings recoat slower in those conditions. Either the setback gets suspended on work nights or the schedule gets longer, and it is cheaper to decide that in the pre-bid walk than at 3 a.m. on night two.

How to read a commercial painting bid

Commercial bids only compare if the scope is written the same way for everyone. Four things to pin down.

The unit. Per square foot of floor, per square foot of wall surface, or lump sum. Name it in the scope and every bid comes back on the same basis.

The system, by coat. A real specification reads primer, finish, finish, with product names and a target dry film thickness. Two coats of quality paint is not a specification, it is a sentence.

Surface prep by substrate. Drywall, CMU, ferrous metal, galvanized metal and previously coated surfaces each get different preparation. A bid that treats them as one line is guessing on at least three of them.

What is excluded. Ceilings, exposed deck and structure, mechanical equipment, door frames and the inside faces of demising walls all get quietly assumed in or priced out. Ask for the exclusion list.

Ask for the certificate of insurance and the L&I registration number with the bid rather than after award. Ask whether the crew is employees or subcontractors and whose insurance responds either way. On an occupied building, ask what the daily floor protection plan is and what containment looks like if sanding happens near tenants.

One more line that separates a real bid from a number on a page: how touch-up is handled after other trades finish. On a tenant improvement, drywall gets damaged after paint by flooring, casework and electrical. Deciding in advance who patches it keeps that argument off the punch list.

Coatings by substrate

Most commercial disappointments are a coating on the wrong surface.

CMU block. Bare block is porous enough to swallow a gallon or more of paint per 100 square feet. It takes a block filler at roughly 10 to 15 mils dry, sprayed through a large tip and back-rolled to push material into the voids, then finish coats over that. Skipping block filler produces blotchy coverage, mortar joints that read through, and a wall that eats more finish paint than the filler would have cost.

Ferrous metal. Door frames, railings, bollards and exposed structural steel. Rust gets removed to a defined standard, then a direct-to-metal acrylic or an industrial urethane depending on exposure. Whatcom County air off the bay carries salt, so exterior steel here works harder than the same steel would 60 miles inland.

Galvanized metal. Never assume galvanizing takes a standard primer. It has to be cleaned of mill oils and coated with a system rated for galvanized surfaces, or the coating sheets off inside a year.

EIFS and stucco. An elastomeric coating bridges hairline cracks and sheds water, which is what a wall assembly wants in a city taking 36 inches of rain a year. It goes on thick, so coverage rates run roughly half what a standard acrylic gets, and that shows up in the material line.

Interior drywall in occupied space. Low-odor, low-VOC commercial acrylics, eggshell in corridors and a scrubbable finish anywhere hands and carts reach the wall.

Shops and warehouses. Where there is equipment, forklift traffic or washdown, the answer moves to industrial urethanes. They cost more per gallon and survive cleaning cycles that would strip a standard acrylic in a season.

Turnovers and tenant improvements

Turnover paint is a different product from a scheduled repaint, and it gets priced on speed and repeatability.

The things that hold turnover costs down are boring and they work. One standard wall color and one standard trim color across the portfolio, kept on file at the paint store by formula so nobody is color matching under pressure. A standard written scope so every unit gets the same treatment and nothing is being decided on the day. And a punch walkthrough that happens before the unit is listed rather than after a tenant complains about it.

A standard unit is normally a one day paint once it is empty and clean. What blows the schedule is choosing colors unit by unit and finding drywall damage that needs real repair instead of a patch.

On office and retail tenant improvements, paint sits between drywall and flooring in the sequence and it is the trade that gets squeezed when the schedule slips. Two things protect it. A real recoat window built into the schedule, since a coating that needs 16 hours between coats does not care that the tenant wants keys Friday. And a written agreement about who patches damage caused by the trades that follow paint.

Sequence detail that saves money on every job: paint before finish flooring goes in, then run a touch-up pass after the other trades clear. Painting after flooring means masking the entire floor, and masking is labor you are paying for by the hour.

Where commercial jobs go wrong

Coating over chalk. An old exterior acrylic that has broken down leaves a chalky residue on the surface. New paint over unwashed chalk peels in sheets. A wash is not an upsell on an exterior repaint, it is the adhesion step.

Film-forming paint on historic masonry. The most expensive mistake available downtown or in Fairhaven, and the one that cannot be undone cheaply.

Block filler skipped. Shows up first as a blotchy wall and second as a change order for a third finish coat that never quite fixes it.

Painting to a deadline instead of a recoat interval. The usual source of soft, marking finishes on a tenant improvement. Recoat times get longer in a cold, damp building, and a coating that was rushed marks for months.

No mil thickness in the specification. Two coats applied thin is not two coats applied at spec, and with no target thickness written down there is nothing to measure and nothing to enforce.

Water nobody dealt with. A failed joint sealant, a plugged scupper or leaking parapet flashing will destroy new coating on the wall below, usually the winter after the job. Fix the water first, then paint. Doing it the other way around buys the same wall twice.

What Washington requires on your project

Anyone painting a commercial building in Washington has to be registered as a contractor with Labor and Industries. A specialty contractor carries a $15,000 bond, and minimum liability coverage is $200,000 public liability with $50,000 property damage, or a $250,000 combined single limit. Bond amounts went up on July 1, 2024, so a certificate dated before that is worth a second look. The L&I Verify a Contractor lookup shows registration status, bond and insurance for free, and it takes about a minute.

Bellingham Painting Co. is operated by KINGTIDES LLC, UBI 605 901 722, a licensed and insured Washington business, BBB accredited with an A+ rating.

Pre-1978 buildings

The EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting rule covers housing and child-occupied facilities built before 1978. Child-occupied facilities include day care centers and preschool or kindergarten classrooms, which catches a fair number of commercial tenants in older Bellingham buildings. The trigger is more than 6 square feet of interior painted surface disturbed per room, or more than 20 square feet on the exterior, and window replacement or demolition of painted surfaces is covered at any size. The firm has to be certified, not only the worker holding the tool. Bellingham Painting Co. is an EPA Lead-Safe certified firm.

Public works and tax

If the building is a public works project, prevailing wage applies. The contractor files a statement of intent to pay prevailing wages with L&I before work starts and an affidavit of wages paid at the end, and the awarding agency holds retainage against those filings. The practical point for an owner or agency is to have prevailing rates in the estimate at bid time rather than at award.

On tax, Washington charges retail sales tax on construction work and the combined Bellingham rate is 9.2 percent. Under RCW 82.08.050 a quoted price is presumed to exclude sales tax unless the tax is itemized, so confirm which way each bid is written before you compare them. Separately, the RCW 18.27.114 disclosure statement is required on commercial buildings when the contract price is $1,000 or more but under $60,000, and a contractor who never delivered it cannot lien the property.

Recoat cycles and a maintenance plan

Commercial coatings are a scheduled expense rather than an event, and putting them on a cycle costs less than reacting to them.

Interior corridors, lobbies and elevator landings take the abuse and come up first. Private offices and conference rooms go much longer. Suites usually get repainted at turnover regardless of condition, because the cost of a slow lease-up dwarfs the cost of paint.

Exteriors are set by exposure. In Bellingham the south and west elevations take the UV while the north side takes the moisture and grows the moss, so those two sides fail for different reasons and rarely on the same schedule.

Two habits stretch every cycle. Wash the building on a schedule, because dirt and biological growth hold water against the film, and washing starts at $0.30 per square foot against a repaint measured in dollars per square foot. And keep touch-up paint on site, labeled by building and elevation, with the formula written on the lid rather than living in someone's email.

Walk the property twice a year, once in October before the wet months and once in April after them. Look at sealant joints, the bottom 18 inches of every wall, the north elevation for growth, and anywhere water leaves a roof. Damage found in April is a repair. The same damage found two winters later is a repaint.

If you also own a house or a small residential rental, exteriors there run $4,200 to $9,350 for a typical home. See exterior painting and pressure washing for those scopes.