Denver CO painting for interiors, exteriors, cabinets and commercial buildings. Paint fails here faster than almost anywhere in the country. Thin air, hard sun, hail and freeze-thaw all work against the coating. We prep for that. Free written estimates across the metro.
Tell us about the project. We will get back to you with a written, itemized quote.
A paint job that lasts twelve years on the Gulf Coast can start chalking here in five. That is not a materials problem. It is an altitude problem, and it changes how the work has to be done.
The atmosphere is the filter. At a mile up there is measurably less of it overhead, so more ultraviolet light reaches the south and west faces of your house every single day.
UV breaks down the resin binder that holds pigment to your siding. When the binder fails you get chalking, fading and eventually peeling. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that UV radiation increases roughly two percent for every 1,000 feet of elevation gain. Denver sits at 5,280 feet.
That effect compounds. Colorado's UV Index routinely reaches the "very high" and "extreme" ranges on the EPA scale, including on cool days and partly cloudy days when nobody thinks about sun exposure. Your north wall and your south wall are living in two different climates.
Denver swings hard. It is common to see a forty degree temperature change inside a single day in spring and fall. Every one of those swings makes your siding expand and contract. Moisture that got into a hairline crack freezes, expands, and pushes the coating off the substrate from underneath.
This is why caulk inspection matters more here than in most markets, and why we check every joint around windows, doors and trim before a brush ever comes out.
Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming form the region the National Weather Service calls Hail Alley, the most hail-prone area in the country. Hail does not just dent gutters. It chips coating off the high side of lap siding and drives moisture into the exposed wood underneath, where it sits and rots quietly for a season before anyone notices.
Sources: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency UV Index; NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory.
Residential and commercial. Interior and exterior. Every project gets a written, itemized estimate before anyone shows up with equipment.
The service Denver homes need most, and the one where prep separates a five-year job from a twelve-year job.
Low humidity makes interior paint set fast here. That narrows the wet edge window and shows every lap mark if the crew is not adjusting for it.
The highest-impact dollar in a kitchen. A refinish costs a fraction of replacement and takes days instead of weeks.
Offices, retail, multi-family and HOA property. Scheduled around your operations, not ours.
Horizontal surfaces take the worst of Colorado sun. Decks need attention on a shorter cycle than walls do.
Stucco and brick need breathable coatings. Seal them with the wrong product and you trap moisture inside the wall.
Ask any painter what separates a good job from a bad one and they will tell you the same thing. It is not the paint. It is what happened to the surface before the paint got there.
Prep is the single largest labor line on a proper exterior estimate. If a bid comes in dramatically under everyone else, prep is almost always where the hours were removed.
It is a word every painter uses and almost nobody itemizes. Here is what it covers on a Denver exterior:
Pressure washing. Not just dirt. Denver's wind drives fine dust into every horizontal surface, and that dust holds moisture against your siding. Chalked coating has to come off too, or the new paint bonds to loose powder instead of wood.
Scraping and feathering. Failed paint gets scraped back to a sound edge, then the transition gets sanded so it disappears under the new coat instead of telegraphing through it.
Wood repair. Rotted trim, fascia and sill gets replaced before coating. Painting over rot hides it for one season and costs more to fix the next.
Caulking. Every joint where two materials meet gets inspected. Failed caulk is the main way water gets behind a coating during freeze-thaw.
Priming. Bare wood, patched areas and severe color changes get primed. Skipping primer on bare substrate is the fastest way to a peel in three years.
We work primarily with Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore. Both make exterior lines with the UV inhibitors and flexible binders that altitude and freeze-thaw demand.
Flexibility matters more here than most homeowners realize. A brittle coating cracks when siding expands on a seventy degree afternoon and contracts on a thirty degree night. A flexible acrylic moves with it.
If you want to preview colors before we meet, Sherwin-Williams runs a free color visualizer where you can upload a photo of your own house and try combinations on it. Homeowners who come to the estimate with two or three favorites make the whole process faster.
A large share of Denver metro homes sit inside an HOA with an approved color palette. Getting a color rejected after the work is done is an expensive mistake. We will tell you at the estimate if your neighborhood is likely to require submission, and we can work from your association's approved list.
Every review below is public on Google. Search "Bighorn Painting" and read all 94 for yourself. We would rather you check than take our word for it.
"We hired Asa and Bighorn for a massive month-long project in Winter Park. It involved dozens of wooden decks that were deteriorated, stucco, and rough cut wooden siding on a 5 story high building. Throughout the process, there was great communication."
"Bighorn Painting did a phenomenal job and no corners were cut. A lot of prep work needed to be done and the crew took a lot of pride in their prep work which made for an amazing finished product. We were away on vacation while the house was painted."
"If you're looking to get your house painted this summer or fall, I cannot say enough good things about Bighorn Painting! What a stunning update! We went from brown with more brown trim to cream with bronze accents!"
"Love the result! Asa was very easy to work with. Price was reasonable and competitive. Crew was detailed and respected our property. Did things the right way to ensure a quality paint job! Fully recommend!!"
"I am very happy with the work that Big Horn Painting did on my home. We had new siding placed on the home a few months back, but the project looked incomplete due to the garage door, soffits, trim etc still being the old color."
Across 94 public Google reviews. Homeowners consistently call out three things: the prep work, the communication, and the crew's respect for the property.
Colorado gives you a real exterior season and a real off-season, plus some surprisingly good shoulder weeks that most homeowners never think to use.
Most exterior products need surface temperatures to stay above roughly 50°F through cure, though some modern acrylics are rated lower. The limiting factor in Denver is usually the overnight low, not the daytime high.
Long days, warm surfaces and reliable overnight lows. The one thing to plan around is the afternoon thunderstorm pattern that sets up in July and August. Fresh coating and a sudden downpour do not mix, so summer work means watching the radar and painting the right elevation at the right hour.
Cooler air, lower UV and far less competition for calendar space. Cooler surfaces also mean a longer wet edge, which on a large wall produces a more uniform finish than painting in ninety degree afternoon sun. If your schedule is flexible, the shoulder weeks are often the better job.
Exterior work becomes weather dependent, but this is the right time for interiors, cabinets and commercial spaces. It is also when scheduling is easiest. If you want exterior work done first thing in spring, winter is when to get on the calendar.
Walk the perimeter on a bright day and look for these. Any two together means it is time to get a quote.
Paint is one of the few home improvements with published, large-sample data behind it. Not contractor opinion. Actual analysis of what homes sold for.
Zillow's Paint Colors Analysis reviewed more than 32,000 photos from listings that sold across the country, controlling for square footage, home age, transaction date and location. The findings on exteriors were direct.
Homes with exteriors in "greige," a blend of light gray and beige, sold for $3,496 more than comparable homes painted medium brown or finished in tan stucco. Front doors in dark navy through slate gray brought roughly $1,514 more at closing.
A later expansion of that work analyzed more than 135,000 listing photos from sales between 2010 and 2018.
Zillow's more recent research surveyed thousands of home buyers on how interior paint color affected their interest and their offer price. Sage green was the only shade to land in the top tier in every room tested. On the other end, a bold red bathroom drew offers roughly $7,971 lower than the same room in white, the single largest negative effect they measured.
Source: Zillow Paint Colors Analysis and Zillow buyer research. Figures are national averages, not Denver-specific, and reflect correlation across large samples rather than a guarantee on any individual home.
Most painting companies will not put any number in front of you until they are standing in your driveway. Here is the honest version, with the caveat that only a walkthrough produces a real quote.
| What drives the price | Why it matters in Denver |
|---|---|
| Square footage and stories | Two-story and three-story work needs staging, ladders or lifts. Access is a real labor cost, not an upsell. |
| Substrate | Wood, fiber cement, vinyl, stucco and brick each need different primers and different prep. Stucco and brick need breathable coatings so moisture is not trapped in the wall. |
| Condition | The single biggest swing factor. A house with sound coating needs a wash and two coats. A house with widespread failure needs scraping, sanding, rot repair and priming first, which can double the labor. |
| Number of colors | Body, trim, accent and door each add cut-in time. A three-color scheme costs more to execute than a two-color scheme. |
| Product grade | Premium exterior lines cost more per gallon and last materially longer under UV. At altitude this is usually where cheaping out costs the most. |
| Prep depth | The line item most often cut to win a bid. If one estimate is far below the others, compare the prep sections side by side before comparing totals. |
| Interior specifics | Ceiling height, texture matching, trim linear footage, and whether furniture needs moving and protecting. |
| Cabinets | Door and drawer count, whether boxes get sprayed in place, hardware removal, and how much degreasing the existing finish needs. |
Get three. Everyone says it and it is still right. But compare them on structure, not on the bottom line.
Look at how prep is described. A bid that says "prep and paint" is hiding the largest variable in the job. A bid that itemizes washing, scraping, caulking, priming and repair is telling you what you are buying.
Ask how many coats, and on what. Two coats on the body but one on the trim is a common way to shave a bid.
Ask what product line, specifically. "Sherwin-Williams" is a company. The product line inside it is what determines UV performance.
Ask who is actually on site. Some companies subcontract everything. That is not automatically bad, but you should know before, not after.
Ask about the warranty in writing. Verbal warranties are worth what they cost.
Painting is a labor business. Material is a minority of the cost on most residential jobs. When a bid comes in dramatically low, the hours came out of somewhere, and it is almost always prep.
The result is a job that looks identical for about eighteen months. Then the parts that were not properly prepped start to fail, and because the failure is patchy rather than uniform, the fix is a full repaint rather than a touch-up.
The reviews above mention prep repeatedly and without prompting. That is not an accident of wording. It is what homeowners notice when it is done properly.
Based in Arvada, working across Denver and the Front Range. Denver's housing stock changes character every few blocks, and the painting problems change with it.
Wash Park, Congress Park, Baker, Platt Park, Berkeley, Sunnyside, Whittier, Five Points and Park Hill are full of bungalows, Denver Squares and Victorians with original wood siding and detailed trim.
Two things matter here. First, homes built before 1978 may contain lead paint, which changes how disturbed surfaces must be handled. Second, the trim detail on these houses is where the labor actually is, and any bid that treats a 1920s bungalow like a modern box has not looked closely.
Parts of Denver also sit inside designated historic districts where exterior changes can require review. We will flag it at the estimate if your address is likely affected.
Virginia Village, Harvey Park, Mar Lee, Athmar Park, University Hills and Bonnie Brae bring brick ranches with painted trim, soffit and fascia. Often the brick stays and only the trim gets painted, which is a smaller and faster job than most owners expect.
Central Park, Green Valley Ranch, Lowry, RiNo and the Highlands infill builds run to fiber cement, synthetic stucco and modern composites. These reach the ten to fifteen year mark where builder-grade coating gives out, and they usually need a product-matched primer rather than a general purpose one.
We also work throughout the surrounding metro: Arvada (home base), Lakewood, Westminster, Wheat Ridge, Broomfield, Golden, Edgewater, Englewood and Littleton.
Not sure whether you are inside the service area? Call 720-912-4676 and ask. It takes one minute to find out.
A large share of the painting work in Denver happens against a deadline someone else set. Listing dates, closing dates, inspection objections and lease turnovers all come with a clock attached.
Exterior paint is the first thing a buyer sees and the first thing that shows up in listing photos. The Zillow research above found measurable differences in sale price tied to exterior color alone, and that is before accounting for the impression that peeling or chalking makes on a buyer walking up the driveway.
If you are listing, the two highest-return moves are usually a neutral exterior refresh and cabinet refinishing. Both photograph extremely well and both cost far less than the kitchen or siding replacement a buyer might otherwise mentally deduct from their offer.
Timing matters. Painting after the listing photos are taken defeats the purpose. We can work backward from your photo date.
Peeling exterior paint and exposed bare wood show up on inspection reports constantly in Denver, and they can hold up an FHA or VA loan specifically. If you are under contract and an objection landed on your desk with a deadline attached, tell us that when you call. Those jobs get scoped differently because the goal is clearing the objection, not a full cosmetic repaint.
The easiest time to paint the interior of a house is the window between closing and moving in. No furniture to move, no rooms to work around, no living in a construction zone. If you are closing on a Denver home and want the interior done before the truck arrives, that window is usually tight but very workable if we know about it early.
If you manage property or list homes for a living, you need three things from a painting contractor: predictable scheduling, work that survives a walkthrough, and someone who answers the phone. We are set up for repeat relationships rather than one-off transactions, and we are happy to walk a property and provide scoped estimates for a client before they have committed to anything.
Call 720-912-4676 or use the form below and note your deadline in the project details.
Price depends on square footage, number of stories, siding material, the condition of the existing coating, how many colors you want and how much prep the surface needs. Condition is the largest swing factor by a wide margin. A house with sound existing paint needs a wash and two coats. A house with widespread failure needs scraping, sanding, rot repair and priming first, which can double the labor. We provide free written, itemized estimates so you can see exactly what you are paying for rather than a single lump number.
May through September is the most reliable window. Late April and October are excellent and often overlooked, with cooler surfaces that hold a longer wet edge and produce a more uniform finish than painting in direct afternoon sun. The limiting factor in Denver is usually the overnight low rather than the daytime high, since most exterior products need surface temperatures above roughly 50°F through cure. November through March is the right time for interior, cabinet and commercial work.
Three reasons stacked on top of each other. First, altitude. The EPA reports UV radiation increases about two percent per 1,000 feet of elevation, and Denver sits at 5,280 feet. UV breaks down the resin binder that holds pigment to the siding. Second, freeze-thaw. Denver's daily temperature swings make siding expand and contract constantly, and moisture in a hairline crack freezes and pushes coating off from underneath. Third, hail. Colorado sits in the region the National Weather Service calls Hail Alley, and hail chips coating off lap siding edges, letting moisture into the wood.
Quality exterior work with proper prep generally holds up well for many years, but the honest answer is that it varies more here than in most markets. South and west facing walls take substantially more UV than north facing walls and will show wear first. Horizontal surfaces like decks and railings need attention on a much shorter cycle than vertical walls. The two biggest determinants are the quality of the prep and whether a premium exterior product was used.
We work primarily with Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore. Both make exterior lines with the UV inhibitors and flexible binders that high-altitude, freeze-thaw conditions require. Flexibility matters here specifically, because a brittle coating cracks when siding expands on a warm afternoon and contracts overnight. If you have a preferred brand or a specific product, we are happy to work with it.
Yes. We will walk through options with you and can provide samples so you can see a color on your own wall in your own light before committing. Sherwin-Williams also runs a free online color visualizer where you can upload a photo of your house and try combinations on it. Homeowners who arrive at the estimate with two or three favorites tend to move faster and end up happier.
Yes, and it matters. A large share of Denver metro homes sit inside an association with an approved color palette, and getting a color rejected after the work is finished is an expensive mistake. We will tell you at the estimate whether your neighborhood is likely to require submission, and we can work directly from your association's approved list.
Not for exterior work. One of our Google reviewers had their house painted while they were away on vacation. For interior work most homeowners prefer to be around at the start and the finish, but it is not required. We agree access arrangements before the first day so there are no surprises either way.
Yes. Our crew handles moving, covering and repositioning larger furniture. Larger pieces get shifted to the center of the room and fully draped, and floors are protected throughout. We do ask that you clear smaller items from shelves, countertops and windowsills before the first day.
Yes. Bighorn Painting is licensed and insured in Colorado, and carries general liability coverage. We are happy to provide current certificates on request before work begins, and we would encourage you to ask any contractor you are considering for the same.
In most cases yes, and it is one of the highest-impact dollars in a kitchen. Refinishing costs a fraction of replacement and takes days rather than weeks. Doors and drawers come off and get sprayed for a factory-smooth finish, hardware is removed and reinstalled, and boxes are finished in place. Cabinets that are structurally sound but dated are ideal candidates.
Compare the structure of the bids, not just the totals. Look at how prep is described, since that is the largest variable and the line most often cut to win a job. Ask how many coats and on which surfaces, since two coats on the body and one on the trim is a common shortcut. Ask for the specific product line rather than just the brand. Ask who will physically be on site. And get the warranty in writing. If one bid is dramatically lower than the others, the hours came out of somewhere, and it is almost always prep.
No pressure, no obligation, no sales visit disguised as an inspection. We look at the property, measure it, and send you an itemized estimate you can compare against anyone else's.
Serving Denver, Arvada, Lakewood, Westminster, Wheat Ridge, Broomfield, Golden, Edgewater, Englewood and Littleton.
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