Category: Painting

House painting is many times longer than it takes to paint a house. So why does it take so long?

The answer is that there are not as many painters as houses. This makes the job take longer because of two effects. The first is that if there were more painters, each painter could specialize and produce more houses per day. This would be just like the effect Wikipedia has on the number of encyclopedia articles: if there were more contributors, each one could write more articles and there would be more total.

There also seems to be something about house painting that attracts people who like to paint houses, and these people can’t paint very many houses in a day. So this makes house painting take even longer than it would otherwise.

This means that if you want your house painted faster, you can either increase the number of painters or persuade some painters to work harder, or both. If you want to persuade some painters to work harder, you can pay them more or give them other incentives that make painting a better use of their time relative to other things they could do instead. This may involve offering to reduce the amount of time it takes for their next house or reducing their other costs by giving them a good deal on brushes and turpentine.

If you don’t have any paint lying around, you can start by stealing some from someone who does. I’m not telling you to steal, mind you. I’m just saying that if you’re going to try house painting for the first time in your life, and you have a friend who has a lot of extra paint lying around, it might be a good idea to try some on a wall of his first.