Is it ok to paint walls now and doors and casing later?

Question

Recently had carpet and old baseboards removed from my house and hardwood sanded and refinished with Provincial floor stain. Now we've hired a painter to paint three bedrooms, hallway, living room, plus install and paint new baseboards.

We decided to go with white for the new baseboards but unsure what to do about the doors, door casings and closets of each room, which is all stained wood and doesn't look very nice.

The easy answer is to have the painter paint the doors and trim white when he paints but the doors are in poor condition. The door jams and door casings are also pretty bad with chips and splintered wood. Only the closet doors look halfway decent.

Ideally I'd like to get three new prehung doors installed before he starts painting. Then have him paint the new doors, install and paint the door casings in addition to the walls, ceilings and baseboards. But this is an older house built in the 1950's and the rough opening for the doors are not standard, so I'll need to special-order them, which will cause a delay.

The painter is coming to start this weekend and is probably going to begin with patching walls and baseboard installation. So my question is it that bad of an idea to just have him paint and do baseboards now, then have new prehung doors installed along with all new door casings and have it all painted white sometime later?

Answer 1

Other than cost, which will depend on the painter, there isn't that much of a difference. The concerns I know of are:

• Matching Paint Colors That is (a) not nearly as much of an issue with white as with other colors and (b) if you are talking about a short amount of time (weeks as opposed to months or years), you could get all the paint at one time.

• Aging Painting part of a room 2 years after painting another part of the room may not match exactly due to aging effects from sunlight, etc. But a few weeks, even a few months, is not likely to cause a noticeable difference.