How much and how long to have a house interior painted?

[Emeye]

My house is a 3 bed 1960s detached. Whole interior of house needs repainting - walls, ceiling, woodwork - bathroom and kitchen have been fully replastered, a couple of walls have been reskimmed.

The rest of the walls are plaster with wallpaper already stripped off which needs prepping, sanding, holes filling etc.

Does £2600 in the North West for labour for 2 guys over 3 weeks (15 working days) sound about right? I'll supply the paint. It works about £173 per day.

[Emeye]

The walls will need a lot of prep. They are covered in the adhesive from the nasty old wallpaper that I have steam stripped off.

[Emeye]

rufusgti said:

This is where a good plasterer comes in very handy.
To be honest I don't know how long it can take a decorator to prep a room, but they should be able to decorate in a day.
A good plasterer will skim a room in a couple of days, give him two rooms and he'll do the two in a couple of days. They like to do two walls at a time ( or mine does anyway). So if they can do two sets and jump onto the next room they can get a fair bit done.
Plasterers and decorators seem to charge roughly the same money. And I would prefer a freshly skimmed wall every time. So I wouldn't be paying a decorator to spend days or weeks prepping walls.

Thanks for everyone's replies - last night I decided I would have all the remaining walls that had not already been replastered, skimmed. It means delaying moving in another few weeks while we have to wait for my plasterer to become available, but he will do all the painting afterwards.

As well as working out much cheaper, the finish will be a million times better - again, due to time scales on our last refurb house we had the walls lined and painted instead of skimmed and I was never happy with it.

We plan to live in this house forever, so makes sense to do it correctly.