Interior House Painters in Napier & Hawke’s Bay
Interior Painters You Can Trust for a Clean, High-Quality Finish
Painting the inside of your home should feel like an upgrade — not a disruption.
Bay Decorating provides professional interior painting across Napier, Hastings and the wider Hawke's Bay, for homeowners repainting a family home and for builders finishing a new build. Interior house painting is mostly what happens before the paint goes on, so that is where our time goes: proper preparation, tidy work, and a quote that shows you where the money goes.
What’s Included in Our Interior Painting Service
Our interior painting services typically include:
Careful protection of floors, carpets, furniture and joinery
Full surface preparation — washing, sanding, filling, re-sanding
Light plastering, including nail pops, dents and the small dings a house collects
Filling and gapping trims
Priming where it's needed, for adhesion and durability
Two full topcoats, applied evenly
Trims, doors and joinery take more coats than the two a wall gets, and they take the most cutting-in time of anything on an interior. That's the part a rushed job skimps on, so we give it its own line on the quote.
Rooms & Spaces We Commonly Paint
We cover every part of a home, right across Napier and Hawke's Bay:
Living rooms and lounges
Bedrooms and hallways
Kitchens and dining areas
Bathrooms and laundries
Ceilings, trims, doors and skirting boards
Living in the Home While We Paint? No Problem.
Most of our interior jobs happen while people are still living in the house, so we stage the work room by room and agree the order with you before we start. You always have somewhere to sleep, cook and sit.
How we manage dust
Dust is what people actually mind, and it's the thing that goes wrong most often on somebody else's job. So we sand with the windows shut, and only open them once we get to the reveals and the window sashes. It sounds like the wrong way round, and it's the single biggest thing we do to keep dust out of the rest of your home. If we're working in one room, we plastic-tape that door shut before any sanding or plastering starts, so nothing travels down the hallway.
At the end of every day we pack down, vacuum and leave the walkways clear. Your home isn't a building site and we don't treat it like one.
How Much Does Interior Painting Cost in Napier & Hawke’s Bay?
A full interior repaint of a three-bedroom house in Hawke's Bay generally lands between $10,000 and $14,000. That's against an average single-storey home of around 140 square metres, and it includes basic plastering and filling. Full skim-coating and wallpaper removal sit outside it and are quoted separately — stripped wallpaper needs its own priming system before any topcoat, and it's the most common reason two interiors of the same size come in thousands apart (here's why paint bubbles on a stripped wall).
Worth knowing when you're comparing quotes: about $2,000 of that job is paint, before anybody lifts a brush. Work out what's left for labour on a three-bedroom house when a quote comes in at $3,500.
Cheap paint also doesn't stay cheap once it's on the wall. We use Resene, the dearest on the shelf at around $200 for a 10-litre bucket of interior. The cheaper stuff is thinner, so it takes more coats to cover, and the extra labour costs more than you saved on the tins.
The paint is always in the price. As Nicole puts it: "I'm always trying to make sure that all of our quotes reflect everything straight off the bat so that there's no hidden costs."
For the whole-house picture, including roofs and villas, see our guide to what it costs to paint a house in Napier.
Why Choose Bay Decorating for Interior Painting?
We're Nicole and Tim, a husband-and-wife team who own the business and work in it. Nicole quotes every job, does the site visits and checks the work before it's signed off. Tim handles the plaster work and anything at height, and trained in Wellington on big heritage villas.
Zane does most of our interior joinery painting in Napier homes and most of the fine cutting-in. Cherie joined us in April 2026 after about eighteen years painting in Australia, much of it on villas, and her prep on fine detail is as good as we've had.
A villa up on the Napier hill is a fair example of how we quote. Living areas went to a bright white, bedrooms into colour, and the dark stained joinery and timber window trim were all painted out. What changed the quote was the family — there are kids in that house, so the prep went deeper than a makeover normally needs. Paint in a family home has to survive the family, and that's decided at quoting stage.
The same small crew turns up every day, and everyone who comes to your house works for us.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Most interior painting jobs take between 3 days and 2 weeks, depending on the size of the home and the amount of prep required. Older homes and villas with a lot of patching and sanding sit at the longer end. We hold to proper drying time between coats and give you a realistic timeframe upfront.
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Yes, and a good share of our work is new builds. We come in once the plastering is finished, seal everything on the first day, then work through ceilings, walls and joinery room by room — primed, prepped, filled and gapped before anything gets a topcoat.
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We walk through the house with you, look at the condition of the walls and ceilings, talk through colours and finishes, and explain how we'd stage the job around you. You get it in writing, with no pressure to proceed. There are more answers on our FAQ page, and the rest of what we do sits under all of our painting services.
Get a Quote for Interior Painting in Napier & Hawke's Bay
Get in touch for a site visit and a detailed quote. If you're planning an interior repaint and want straight answers and a finish that lasts, we'd love to help.