Key Take Aways
DIY exterior painting is time-consuming and risky: Sourcing tools, navigating ladders, and reaching upper areas takes considerable effort and presents safety hazards.
Even professionals require days: Specialists like All Weather Coating need several stages and multiple days to complete a job—DIY takes even longer.
Estimated personal time investment: 98 hours: That’s roughly two weeks of 7-hour days, which could be spent on more rewarding activities.
Alternative uses of your time: You could fly to the moon (took Apollo 11 about 109 hours) or binge-watch both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul in under 94 hours.
Conclusion: The massive time and effort make DIY exterior painting impractical—professional services are quicker, safer, and more effective.
Painting the exterior of your property, in its entirety, is right up there with the most time-consuming DIY tasks. Just acquiring the right equipment – the perfect shade of off-white paint, a suitably sized ladder, the dustsheets you need to protect the rest of your home from stray flecks of paint, can take days. Actually doing the painting is laborious. Each side of the house is a project in itself, making completing all four a gargantuan effort. Straining to reach the uppermost corners of your home’s exterior is taxing, not to mention hazardous. All of the risk you have to shoulder, as well as the massive amount of time you have to invest, makes painting your home’s exterior an unenviable pursuit. Why do it yourself when you can entrust the task to specialists? They’ll do a better job and they’ll do it quicker.
For All Weather Coating, and many other wall coating specialists besides, a complete exterior painting job takes days and days. There is a preparation stage, a repair stage, a cleaning stage and a waterproofing stage – all before the weatherproof wall coatings can be applied. If it takes a professional team of specialists at least several days, how long is it going to take you? For the purposes of this post, in which we are going to contemplate some of the more desirable things you could be doing in the time it would take you to paint your home’s exterior, we are going to assume that this length of time is about two weeks. Assuming you work 7 hours a day, that’s 98 hours. What could that time more profitably be spent doing?
Fly to the moon
Apollo 11 launched on 16th July 1969 and landed on 20th July 1969. Travelling at a rate of around 7 miles per second, it took the spacecraft 75 hours and 56 minutes to enter the orbit around the moon, and an additional 33 hours, 44 minutes for mission commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin to set foot on the moon. You would spend less time travelling to the moon than you would, perched precariously at the top of your home, straining and stretching to paint your home’s eaves!
Watch the entirety of Breaking Bad... and its prequel Better Call Saul
Including its prequel Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad narrative spans eight years: from 2002 to 2010. Better Call Saul follows the trials and tribulations of the ethically dubious lawyer Jimmy McGill while Breaking Bad charts Walter White’s evolution from chemistry teacher to meth kingpin. The latter sees the two characters mix in the same circles. Both series are critically acclaimed and universally adored. In the 98 hours it would take you to paint your home’s exterior, you could watch both series in their entirety… and still have 4 hours left over. The Better Call Saul series, to date, clocks in at around 32 hours while Breaking Bad lasts around 62 hours.
Watch Breaking Bad or fly to the moon? Regardless of their relative worth as accomplishments, they are both infinitely more desirable pursuits than attempting to paint the exterior of your home single-handedly. Next time you consider painting your home’s exterior on your own, just think of the sheer amount of time you’d have to invest – and how else you could spend that time!
