Name: Peter Jensen
Background: Jensen and his four children are following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather in the housepainting profession. Jensen started painting in 1956, and took over Lauritz Jensen Decorators soon afterward. He continues to run the business out of his home/shop in Palatine with two brothers, his children and nephews.
Years as a house painter: 36 years
When I first started learning the business with my father, we were in the Edgewater area of Chicago. I moved to the Northwest suburbs in 1960.
We do all residential work-interior and exterior painting, paper hanging and wood finishing. On most evenings I make four to five visits to do estimates. Each visit takes about 15 minutes. When I go to a home, I look at the conditions in a room that`s to be painted. Are there heavy smokers in the house? Do the walls need heavy patching? Is there water damage?
Then, first thing the next morning, I`m at the computer, typing up the estimates from the night before. That can take me an hour to an hour and a half. In addition to the estimates, I`m in charge of scheduling our seven painters, and I also do the billing.
At 7 a.m. my brother David shows up for coffee. Eventually there are six of us here in the shop, out back, loading the truck with what we need for the day. I give out the work sheets. Some jobs are a week or two, but most last one to two days.
Our bread-and-butter jobs are the one- to two-day ones. And 50 to 60 percent of our business comes from previous customers. In summer, in a good year, we`re backlogged for 12 weeks.
When we arrive to start a job, we hope that the homeowners have gotten their knickknacks down so we can arrange the furniture. When we get to some homes, it looks as if they had no idea a painter was coming.
Generally we put furniture in the center of the room, cover it with plastic and cover the floor with canvas. We tape the baseboard, then check to see if there is any patching to be done. If there are heavy smokers in the house, we may have to wash everything.
When I first worked in the city, we never started any paint job without washing first. People still burned coal in the furnace, trains burned coal;
things were much dirtier then than today.
We actually specialize in painting houses that don`t need painting. A lot of people think when it`s been four or five years, that the room needs to be painted again. A good paint job will last anywhere from 10 to 12 years.
After we prime the patches, most of our work can be done with one coat of paint. A drastic color change could necessitate two coats.
Paint colors come and go. The brand we use includes about 10 different shades of white, and about one-half to to two-thirds of our customers choose a paint from that range of colors. I can remember the very first time we put off-white on a wall, about 30 years ago. We thought the people were crazy. Back then they used strong colors like battleship gray and forest green. I don`t know how many forest-green apartments we painted in the late `50s.
Preparation is the name of the game in any paint job, but for exteriors, it`s doubly important. We always power wash the outside first, power sand, then prime the surface and caulk any cracks. While it has to be done, none of us likes going up the extension ladder. For that reason, we don`t paint churches.
Wallpaper just about died out 30 years ago, then came back strong. Paperhangers of 40 to 50 years ago couldn`t hold a candle to a good paperhanger today. Paper-backed vinyl came in 25 years ago and the first ones were murder to hang. Now there are also a lot of hand-prints and silk-screened panels.
The most expensive paper I`ve ever hung was a mural in Inverness that cost $4,000 for one room. Every panel was an original.
I`ve hung paper for people who have paid more than $190 a roll, but the average price for a good roll of paper is about $15 to $20.
Its fun to work with a designer on custom work. One we work with occasionally on the North Shore picks very strong color combinations-peach and dark green, for instance. I sometimes wonder what it`s going to look like when we`re finished, but it always looks nice.
We rarely will recommend color choices, although I will offer advice from time to time. If a customer is picking colors from a chart, I`ll tell her if a particular color is stronger than it looks.
People do use some different techniques now. Sponge painting is as old as the hills, but it has made a comeback. We do marbleizing, which is painting a wall to make it look like a marble surface.
My brother Dick can take a metal door and make it look like oak or pine. Most new homes have metal doors. They`re more practical because they don`t warp, but people want them to look like wood. There`s more call for these than there used to be.
When picking any type of tradesman, asking for referrals is better than nothing. For a painter, the best thing is to get a recommendation from a very fussy friend who you know has been happy with the work that was done for him or her.
We did a $40,000 job in a house in Northbrook. It was 20 years old and very dated. We repainted the whole thing, inside and out. Dollarwise, that`s probably the biggest job we`ve ever done. When I was working with my dad, we did a mansion on the lake in Wilmette. That bill came to $8,000 or $9,000-which was even more money 35 years ago than it is today.
We get a kick out of rating houses in our own minds, asking ourselves which ones we`d like to live in or own. We get into a lot of nice houses and see homes that most people won`t get into.
There`s a certain amount of satisfaction in seeing a completed job. A paint job will never look any better than when you`ve just finished it. You get to see the immediate results of what you`re doing. And it`s nice when you can see you`re making a difference.
