Healthcare Never Stops. So How Do You Schedule Painting Your Facility?

Of all the facility types in the world, medical facilities – from doctor’s offices to emergency rooms, outpatient clinics to pediatric oncology units – are the most constantly, endlessly in use. The medical industry is 24/7/365 – it never stops, and its buildings rarely close their doors.

This presents a problem for facility managers of course. How, if your building is part of the always-on ecosystem of health and wellness, do you find the time to keep its exterior, but perhaps more troubling, its interior freshly painted and maintained?

Smart scheduling that happens in advance and includes some very smart planning and estimating on the part of your painting contractor. That’s how.

As experts in healthcare painting and floor coatings, and having worked for hospitals, physician groups and other medical institutions all over the Southeastern U.S., we know a few things about how to work our magic around the hectic scheduling issues that surround painting medical facilities. So, we’ve put together a few tips around what to expect from your painting and coatings contractor when it comes to planning and getting the done right.  

What to expect from an experienced healthcare painting and coatings contractor:

On-your-schedule planning that starts months ahead

As painting contractors, we know that in order for our work to get done safely, your work and that of your staff has to stop for a bit. It’s a hassle, but a great painting contractor will do everything in their power to make the shifting of your schedule and the shut-down of various parts of your facility for painting as stressless as possible.

At Custom Coatings, we try to get ahead of this issue by first working months ahead to meticulously scope and plan your project. This gives you a chance to decide when and for how long you can give us that wing of your hospital that needs a fresh coat of paint (for example) and gives us the opportunity to do some math on how many people and how many hours we’ll need to effectively, efficiently complete the job.

To start, we ask about your constraints. Say, you can give us a particular grouping of rooms for three days only. We will then leverage our many years of experience to figure out how many man hours it will take to paint that area, then divide the man hours by the number of people it will take to get it done. If the time is short, we allocate more people. If it’s longer, we know that we can put fewer on the job at once.

Regardless, the work gets done well on your timetable, not ours, no matter what that timetable might be.

An estimate based on more than the size of your rooms

If there’s one piece of advice we can offer people searching for an experienced painting contractor to work on a facility with a sensitive timetable, it’s this: don’t fall for the “price per square foot” trap.

Many painting contractors like to price jobs this way. It seems straightforward, right? You’ve got a room, it’s a certain size, and when you apply a dollar amount per foot, it seems like that should work out fine, right? Not exactly.

While most painters price per square foot, you’ll find that many price per square foot of  floor , not wall space. (And unless they’re painting or coating your floor, that doesn’t make much sense, does it?) Here’s an example: A hallway that’s 100’ long and 8’ wide has floor space of 800 square feet. But if the ceilings are 8’ high, that means 1,728 square feet of wall space. If the walls are 10 feet tall, that’s 2,160 square feet. See where we’re going? It’s a big difference and can result in estimates that pale in comparison to actual costs, and cause stress all around. So, the first thing to understand about good pricing is that you should be looking at a price per square feet of actual wall space.

Recommendations for the right paints and coatings for your specific needs

Healthcare is a special case when it comes to painting and coatings. Rooms aren’t just high-traffic, their walls and floors need to be able to stand up to incredibly harsh conditions, from frequent hot water cleaning to industrial antibacterial products. There’s a lot of amazing technology happening in the paint and coatings worlds right now, from antimicrobial paints that shake off dirt and bacteria to coatings that improve air quality. But there’s a lot to be said for getting a professional recommendation that consists of just the best quality paint you can afford.

To your painting contractor, paint should just be paint. It goes on pretty much the same, no matter if it’s a $10 bucket or a $100 bucket. There may be a difference in cost but compared to the long-term cost of choosing cheap materials, it’s an investment you’ll want to make.

Just think of it like this: cheap paint will have to be applied and re-applied every few years, meaning you’ll have to shut down that part of the facility again, displace staff and patients, and pay your painting contractor’s project and hourly rates multiple times – more often than you’d like, for sure. Choose truly high-quality paint however, and you extend the life of your coatings – in some cases by a decade, even under hash circumstances.

So, select wisely. We’ll be happy to spread it on your surfaces either way.

Ready to get started painting your healthcare facility? We’re here to help . Contact us at info@customcoatingsinc.com or visit our website to fill out a contact form. Want more helpful tips and information on commercial painting for healthcare? Check out our healthcare series on our blog, including articles about enhancing cleaning and safety with Antimicrobial Paints and Safety and Security in Healthcare Coatings.