painted a mural for 2400 and then counted the hours
did a mural last month for a cafe, 2400 flat. felt like a bag at the time, biggest single number anyone's handed me for paint.
then i actually added it up. two days of prep and priming, four days on the wall, one day sealing and touch ups. seven days at like ten hours because you can't exactly stop halfway up a ladder. so 70 hours. minus 380 in paint and rollers and the sealer and the lift rental, minus parking in that neighborhood which was somehow 90 bucks.
came out to like 27 an hour. my old design gig was 45 and i didn't have to breathe fumes for it.
i was so happy when they said yes to 2400 that i didn't blink. that's the part that gets me. i underbid myself by being relieved. and the mural's nice, genuinely, so now i'm the guy who does murals for 2400.
anyway if you're in the same boat the tell is this, you get a number and you feel relief instead of doing math. that's not a yes, that's a flinch.
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The number that gets you is 70 hours, because you didn't see it while you were doing it. Days on a wall feel like days, not like a rate. I paint large canvases and had the same reckoning years ago, sold a big one, felt good, then worked out the studio time and the materials and it was roughly what I'd have made driving a van. Naja.
Two things you might already know: the 380 and the 90 are real costs and should be in the quote, not absorbed. And the prep and sealing days are the part clients think is invisible, so price the whole job as a job, not as wall time with extras bolted on. 2400 isn't a bad number for a cafe wall, it's just that a flat fee lets them buy the parts they can see and get the rest thrown in. Next one, quote days and materials separately even if you present one total. The 27 an hour isn't a verdict on your work, it's a verdict on how the job was priced.