What to Paint Before You Move Into a Brentwood Home

Moving into a new home in Brentwood, Franklin or Nolensville is exciting, and it's also the best chance you'll ever have to paint. Empty rooms are faster to paint, easier to protect and free of the furniture shuffling that comes with painting a lived-in house. If you have even a week or two between closing and moving day, it's worth planning.

Why before move-in matters

Painting an empty house is simpler in almost every way:

• No furniture to move, cover and put back.
• Ceilings and high walls are easier to reach without working around beds and sofas.
• Floors can be fully protected at once.
• Work can move through the house quickly, room after room.

It also means you unpack once, into rooms that already feel like yours.

What to prioritize

You don't have to paint everything. If time is short, focus on the things that are hardest to do later.

Ceilings. Painting a ceiling over furniture is a lot of work. If ceilings are stained, patched or a color you don't like, do them now.

Bedrooms. Once beds, dressers and closets are full, bedrooms are the hardest rooms to empty again.

Main living areas. The rooms you'll spend the most time in set the feel of the whole house. A new color here makes the biggest difference.

Trim and doors. Baseboards and door frames get scuffed during moves, and new homeowners often want to change dated trim colors. Painting trim before furniture goes in is much easier.

Cabinets. If you're planning to paint kitchen or bathroom cabinets, doing it before you unpack your kitchen saves a lot of disruption. See our cabinet painting page for how that work is done.

Cabinet painting in Williamson Estates, Brentwood.

A whole-house example from Governors Club

One Governors Club interior we wrote about on our old blog shows how much can be done in one pass. Over three weeks, the work covered the walls, ceilings, baseboards, doors and frames, window frames, crown molding, the kitchen cabinets and all of the built-in shelving. One color, Sherwin-Williams Fleur de Sel (SW 7666), in Sherwin-Williams Cashmere, tied the whole space together. Work on that scale is far simpler in empty rooms, which is why the weeks before move-in are worth using.

Things to check while the house is empty

An empty house shows what furniture used to hide. As you walk through, look for:

• Nail holes and anchors from the previous owner's pictures and TVs
• Scuffs and marks where furniture rubbed the walls
• Cracks at ceiling corners and above doors
• Water stains on ceilings, which should be checked at the source before being painted over
• Patches that were painted with a slightly different color or sheen

These are easy to fix now and much harder to fix later.

Choosing colors for a house you don't know yet

Choosing colors for a house you've only seen a few times is tricky. A few tips:

• Test in the actual rooms. Light in a Brentwood home tucked into mature trees looks very different from light in an open, newer neighborhood. Put samples on two walls and look at them morning and evening.
• Keep a consistent thread. A single trim color and a small family of wall colors make a house feel connected.
• Start neutral where you're unsure. You can always add a bolder color to one room later, once you've lived there through a season.
• Check your HOA for exterior changes. Interior colors are entirely up to you, but exterior colors in many Brentwood and Franklin neighborhoods need approval. Our guide to getting an exterior color approved by a Brentwood HOA walks through it.

Planning around closing day

Timing is the hardest part. A few suggestions:

1. Get an estimate before closing if you can, so the work can start soon after.
2. Have colors chosen before the first day.
3. Leave time after painting before the movers arrive. Paint is dry to the touch quickly, but it keeps curing for 2–4 weeks.
4. Ask movers to take extra care with fresh walls and door frames.

If closing and move-in are too close together, painting the rooms that matter most and leaving the rest for later is a perfectly good plan.

How we can help

Our main office is in Brentwood, and Nash Painting has painted Middle Tennessee homes since 2009. We'll walk the house with you, help you decide what to do first, and give you a written bid. There's no deposit, nothing is final until you approve the bid, and painting work carries a warranty of up to 10 years, depending on the package. See our interior painting page or schedule an estimate.