Is Spray Painting a Fence Faster Than a Brush?
And What Actually Decides the Day
Short answer: on the fence itself, easily. But the fence is rarely where a painting day goes — and on this Pakuranga Heights job the thing that set the clock was growing in front of it.
A paling fence is a bad surface for a brush and a worse one for a roller. It is not one flat face — it is a row of boards with a gap beside every one of them, rails behind, and timber that has gone rough and thirsty with age. A brush has to find its way into all of that, one paling at a time.
A spray gun lays an even coat across the face and into the gaps in the same pass, and it leaves no brush marks on rough timber. On a long run it is not a small saving, it is a different kind of day.
The Catch: a Gun Paints Everything You Point It Near
Everything a spray gun throws that misses the fence lands on whatever is behind it, and the mist travels further than people expect. So the work on a spray job is front-loaded: masking, covering, and reading the wind before anything gets painted. When the wind is wrong, the gun goes down and that section waits.
That is the honest trade. A brush is slow and forgiving. A gun is fast and completely unforgiving, and it pays you back only if the preparation was done properly.
What Actually Sets the Time: What Is Growing Against It
On this job the inside of the fence had trees and shrubs planted hard up against it, the whole way along. Each one had to be covered, held back, or painted around by hand where it sat too close to use the gun at all — plant by plant, down the full run.
On a clear fence this would have been about six hours. With the planting it was eight. If you want a quick, honest estimate of your own fence, do not measure the fence — look at what is standing in front of it.
One Side or Both?
A boundary run usually only gets painted on your face of it — the other side belongs to a conversation with your neighbour, not to an assumption. But the pieces that return to the house, and the gates, are seen from both sides every day, so those are worth doing front and back. That is how this one was done.
Who Buys the Paint Changes the Number, Not the Job
Here the customer had already bought everything, so the $700 was for the work only. If I buy the materials they go on the invoice at cost on top of the labour. Either way you should be able to see what the paint cost and what the work cost as two separate numbers — if a fence painting quote is one lump sum with no breakdown, ask for one.
So: Gun or Brush?
A long open run of palings: the gun wins and it is not close. A short fence hemmed in by a deck, a driveway full of cars and a neighbour's new weatherboards: the masking can cost more time than the brushing would have, and a brush is the sensible call. Most jobs sit somewhere between the two, which is why it is worth looking at a fence before quoting it rather than pricing it by the metre.
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Fence Gone Grey?
Send a photo of the fence — and of what is planted along it. That is the part that decides the price.
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