Most painting jobs in Vermont are, in legal terms, lead jobs. The state's housing is old, its rules about old paint are detailed, and painting is the trade that touches the most painted surface. A painter in Middlebury, Randolph or Brattleboro who prices your house without asking when it was built has skipped the first question.
How many Vermont houses carry old lead paint?
The Health Department estimates that about 60 percent of Vermont homes were built before 1978, the year lead paint was banned for residential use. Under its renovation, repair and painting rules, Vermont law presumes lead paint is present in every one of them until a proper test shows otherwise. That is the default your painter works from.
Hardware-store lead test kits do not settle the question. The same rules say those kits are not accepted as proof that a house is free of lead. If a painter suggests swabbing a few spots to avoid the lead-safe setup, that suggestion runs against state rules. The route to a lead-free determination is an inspection by a licensed professional, not a kit.
The square-foot thresholds that trigger lead-safe painting
The rules turn on how much painted surface the work disturbs, and the numbers differ by location:
- Inside, lead-safe practices apply once more than one square foot of painted surface is disturbed in any room.
- Outside an owner-occupied house, the threshold is twenty square feet on any one side of the building.
- Outside a rental or a child care facility, it drops to one square foot per side.
Scraping, sanding, heat-gunning or cutting into painted surfaces counts as disturbing them. Rolling a fresh coat over sound paint does not. In practice, almost any exterior repaint of an old house in Bennington or St. Johnsbury, where peeling paint has to come off before new paint goes on, passes the twenty-square-foot line on the first wall.
A painter doing that work needs an RRPM license. Ask for it, and ask how the job will be set up: plastic on the ground to catch chips, containment around windows and doors, how debris is bagged and removed, and how the area is cleaned at the end.
Rentals and the yearly lead duty
Landlords have an extra obligation. The Health Department's Inspection, Repair and Cleaning practices (once called essential maintenance practices) require owners of pre-1978 rental housing to inspect for deteriorated paint, repair it, and file a compliance statement every year. Repairs have to be made within 30 days by RRPM-licensed workers. If you own a rental in Burlington or Essex, the painter you hire for that repair work must be licensed, and the job should produce the paperwork you need for your filing.
When a painting contract crosses $10,000
Painting is one of the trades named in Vermont's residential contractor law, 26 V.S.A. chapter 106. Once a contract with a homeowner passes $10,000 in labor and materials, the painter must be registered with the Office of Professional Regulation, carry the required liability insurance and sign a written agreement before taking money or starting work. A full exterior on a large farmhouse in Shelburne or a big Victorian in Woodstock can easily clear that figure.
You can look the painter up on the OPR lookup. On a fixed or capped price over the threshold, the statute lets the painter ask for no more than 50 percent of the labor or 50 percent of the materials, taking the bigger of the two. On a painting job, where labor is most of the cost, half the labor is usually the larger figure.
Fitting an exterior repaint into a Vermont summer
The exterior season here is short. Paint needs dry surfaces and mild temperatures to cure, and spring comes late in the hill towns, while fall evenings turn cold early. A painting company in Waitsfield or Chelsea may have three solid months to work in. That shapes everything about scheduling.
Book early. Ask where you sit in the painter's queue and how weather delays are handled. Ask how long the house will stand scraped and primed before the finish coats go on, since bare wood exposed for weeks takes on moisture. And ask about the north side of the house, which dries last every morning and is where paint failures usually start.
Prep, products and what the price really covers
The Vermont calculator default for a typical painting job is about $5,600 to $8,350; the Vermont painting cost page shows how size and scope change it. Most of the difference between two quotes is preparation. One painter washes, scrapes, sands the edges smooth, replaces rotted clapboards and trim, primes bare wood and caulks every joint. Another scrapes what is loose and paints. Both may say "two coats."
Ask each painter to write down the prep steps, the primer and finish products by name, the number of coats, and who replaces rotted wood and at what price. For an old house in Bristol or Lyndon, ask how many clapboards they expect to replace and how extra ones will be billed. Ask too what the painter guarantees and for how long. A written warranty against peeling for a few years is common among established firms, and it tells you how confident they are in their prep. Read what it excludes: failures caused by moisture from inside the house, such as a bathroom with no fan behind an exterior wall, are usually carved out, and that is fair.
Barns, sheds and other buildings off the house
Many Vermont properties come with a barn, a carriage shed or a detached garage that needs paint as badly as the house. The registration law treats those differently. Section 5502 of chapter 106 exempts work on a structure not attached to a residential building, so a painter hired only to paint your barn does not need to be on the OPR register, whatever the price. If the same contract covers the house and the barn, the house portion still counts.
Old barns carry old paint too, and the chips from scraping one land in the same yard where children play and vegetables grow. Ask the painter to use the same ground covers and cleanup on an outbuilding that they would on the house, even where the house rules do not strictly reach. The extra cost is small next to cleaning paint chips out of a garden bed.
Interior work in an occupied home
Interior painting raises its own questions in an older Vermont house. Plaster walls crack with the seasons, and a good painter will repair them before painting rather than paint over the cracks. Woodwork with many old layers may need careful scraping under lead-safe practices. Ask how furniture will be moved and protected, whether the painter's liability insurance covers damage inside the house, how long each room will be out of use, and how dust will be controlled if anyone in the house is young or pregnant. A painter who has worked in a lot of older Burlington houses will have a routine for all of it.
