Triple-Decker & Multi-Family Painting in Somerville

The housing type this city is built from

Somerville is the densest municipality in New England, and the triple-decker is the reason. Street after street of three-story, one-unit-per-floor buildings put up between roughly the 1880s and the 1930s, sitting shoulder to shoulder with barely a driveway between them.

Cayo lives here. This is the stock on his own street.

That matters more than it sounds, because a triple-decker is not a big single-family house. It is a different job with a different set of problems, and a painter who quotes it like a suburban colonial will either lose money or cut the prep to make the number work.

What makes a three-decker different

Access, before anything else. These buildings sit close to the street and close to each other. Staging goes up in a gap measured in feet, around parked cars, on a street where every space is spoken for. That has to be planned rather than discovered.

Three times the vertical surface, and most of it detailed. Three floors of siding, three levels of porch railings, three sets of window casings. The ornate porch woodwork on the Victorian-era ones is beautiful and it is all brush work.

Surfaces with a century of paint on them. Most of these buildings have been repainted many times by many different people. Under the current color there is usually failed caulk, softened trim profiles and areas where the previous coat is barely holding. Scraping back to something sound is the job.

Almost all of it predates 1978. Which makes lead a real planning question rather than a footnote — see the FAQ below, and raise your building when you call.

Working around people who live there

Most multi-family painting happens in an occupied building. Somebody is working from home on the second floor, somebody else leaves at six in the morning, and the stairwell you are painting is the only way any of them get to the street.

So the schedule is built around that. Units go one at a time. The stairwell stays usable. Materials do not live in the shared hallway overnight. The site is cleared at the end of each day, because it is somebody’s home and not a construction site.

For landlords and owner-occupants

A good share of Somerville is investor-owned or owner-occupied-plus-rented — you live on one floor and rent out the other two, or you manage the building from elsewhere.

Either way the practical needs are the same: units turned around fast between tenants, a consistent result across the building, and a number that does not move after the work starts.

One specification across the building is the part most people underestimate. Use a different painter for each unit and you end up with the same nominal color in three different sheens and three different qualities. Write the spec once, record it, repeat it — and the building reads as one property rather than three unrelated apartments.

On turnaround work, tell us the date. A recent job was three large apartments in four days with the team on site. If a tenant moves in on the first, the estimate is priced to have it finished before the first.