I am painting a house! For monies!
 

I'm home from college for a couple more weeks now, and I've been asking around for jobs. This lady at my church has one for me: painting her house. The paint's covered with mildew, so she needs me to spray it with this chemical solution to dissolve the mildew first. Then I'm going to have to prime it. Then, paint it. The house is 1275 square feet, I believe. She reckons it'll take about three days all told--one day for each step. Here's my question: how much should she pay me for this? She has no idea herself, and I of course have never had to pay someone to paint my house as I have never owned a house. I'm figuring I'll ask about 80-85% of the professional rate. So, anyone know what the going rate is for a job like that?

Well, I know that here in Winnipeg, painters general start at 12 bucks an hour. I know of professional painters that make upwards of 17 - 20 bucks an hour though. But these are all people that work for a contractor. They get paid hourly whereas the contractor they work for gets paid per house sorta thing. Whether it be per square foot, or per some other measurement, I have no clue.

Which state is the house located in?

Yea, if you are painting the house by yourself, you should ask for a fixed sum up front as you'll end up making more money than by the hour. If you hire a few buddies to help you out, you pay them by the hour.

3 days to finish the house?

I've painted as an occupation for a while. (Both contracted and on my own) I'd say for a 3 day job, and considering that you haven't had much experience with painting, it might take considerably longer to do the job right. However, if you can get her to include the cost of all of the materials for painting; brushes, paint, rollers, sandpaper, primer, etc... I'd say 2000-2300 sounds fairly reasonable.

What you should do is call up a company that actually does this, and ask them how much it would cost them to do the same. Give them as many details as possible, so that they won't insist on coming out to the house to check it out themselves. Then you can fiddle around with how much you want to ask for payment.

Aaaand a week later:

Thanks for all your advice. She ended up deciding to pay me by the hour. And as for the job, I thought painting an entire house in three days sounded a tad ambitious too... until I learned that all I was doing was painting the eaves on a brick house with wooden trim. And she paid me $8 an hour. Doesn't sound too awesome, until you factor in that she also, for some unfathomable reason, paid me for my lunchbreaks. W00t!

PAID Lunch breaks? hehe, that's actually pretty awesome... I'd be eating sushi and crab legs every lunch.

In the area here, house painters usually would receive $11-15.
Just tell her if she can afford that but if not, just negotiate something with her that is fair for both of you.

Dude, you need to knock off this half-assed spammy posting you've been running around making. It's fucking irritating. Read the threads. Here, I'll even point out the pertinent bits to save you time in figuring out why your post was stupid:

completely missed this. That is fair what she did to you. Even though it's not great of a pay, she also included lunchbreaks which is great of her.