Living & Dining Room Painters in Somerville & Boston

The rooms with the most detail

Living rooms and dining rooms are where older Greater Boston houses keep their best woodwork: wainscot, chair rails, crown molding, deep window casings, and sometimes a coffered or beamed ceiling. All of it is brush work, and it is where most of the time on these rooms goes.

The photographs on this page show the range — a Danvers dining room with a white coffered ceiling over soft gray walls, a Norwood dining room in pale blue above white wainscot, a living room in two tones over paneling, and an open-plan ground floor in Danvers caught mid-job.

Coffered ceilings and paneling

A coffered ceiling is some of the slowest painting in a house. Every beam has four faces, every recess is cut in by hand, and all of it is overhead. That is why it is quoted on its own — and why a quote that treats it like a flat ceiling has not looked up.

Wainscot and paneling are the same story at a lower height. Each panel has edges and profiles that a roller cannot reach. And the cap where the paneling meets the wall above is a line that runs the whole length of the room at eye level.

Big walls, open plans

The other challenge in these rooms is scale. A long living room wall in afternoon light shows any patchy coverage or lap marks, so it has to be rolled evenly, wet edge to wet edge.

In open-plan spaces, the question is where one color ends and the next begins. The answer is almost always a natural break — a corner, an archway, a change in ceiling height — and it is worth settling at the walkthrough, before anything is opened.