Getting the house ready for Easter guests when the walls need painting

In the week before Velykos, Lithuanian Easter, every kitchen I know smells of onion skins. They go into the pot to dye the eggs a deep rusty brown, and the children spend an evening making margučiai, the decorated Easter eggs. In a house expecting guests, there is usually a second painting job waiting in the background: the walls.

Say your parents are flying in from Vilnius for Easter and the spare room still has the scuffs of three years of children's birthday parties. Local pages for Colorado Springs interior painting usually cover what a professional job involves, and that is a good place to start reading. This piece is about fitting a repaint around the holiday: what to paint, who does what and how to keep the house usable while it happens.

What Easter asks of the house

Easter in a Lithuanian family is a morning occasion. After the long weeks of Lent, the table is laid early with eggs, ham, cheeses, rye bread, a lamb shaped from butter or sugar, and plenty of people. Guests stay for hours. Children run about hitting eggs together to see whose cracks first, which is a game with its own fierce rules, and then the visitors stay on for days afterwards.

That means the rooms that matter are the dining room or kitchen, the hallway where everyone arrives with coats and boots, and the bedroom the visitors will sleep in. Those are also the rooms that take the most wear the rest of the year. Hallways collect marks from bags and buggies, kitchens get grease and steam, and a spare room that doubles as a playroom shows every crayon.

In a dry, sunny place like Colorado Springs, where the winters bring snow and the light is strong at altitude, walls fade and scuff in their own way. Sunlit rooms lose colour faster, and the dry air is hard on old paint. None of that is a reason to repaint every room. It is a reason to choose the two or three that guests will actually notice.

Deciding what to paint

Walk through the house the way a guest would. Come in through the front door, take off your coat, walk to the table, go to the bathroom, find the bedroom. Notice what you see at each stop. That is your list.

A short checklist for the walk-through:

• The hallway and staircase, where marks show first.
• The dining area or kitchen, if the walls look tired or stained.
• The guest bedroom, especially if it has been used as a playroom or a store room.
• Ceilings with water marks or cracks, which may point to a different problem worth checking first.
• Trim, doors and skirting boards, which often need attention more than the walls themselves.
• Any room in an older house where the paint is peeling or chalky.

Colour is where families tend to argue. My own advice is to keep the guest areas calm and light, which makes rooms look bigger and photographs better, and it suits the linen and the wooden bowls that come out at Easter. Save the bold experiments for rooms the visitors will not see.

Bring samples home and look at them on the actual walls, in morning and evening light. A colour that looks warm and soft on a small card can turn cold in a north-facing hallway or glare in a sunny dining room. Strong mountain light is unforgiving, and so is a room lit only by lamps on a spring evening. Live with the samples for a few days before deciding, and let the person who will sleep in the spare room have a say if they are the opinionated kind. Grandparents usually are.

Two-country note: In Lithuania, spring cleaning before Easter is taken seriously in many homes, with windows washed, rugs beaten and curtains changed before the holiday. Repainting is not part of the ritual, but freshening the house for Velykos very much is. Families abroad often keep the spirit of that habit without quite knowing where it came from.

Who does what

This is where a family occasion becomes a group effort. In our house in Manchester the jobs get decided in advance, at the kitchen table, rather than on the day, and the same works for a repaint.

The family: choose the rooms, agree on colours, empty shelves, move furniture to the centre of the room, and take pictures and mirrors off the walls. Children can help with the light boxes and with labelling where things go back.

A painting company: the preparation and the painting itself. Good interior painters spend much of their time on preparation: filling holes, sanding, cleaning, protecting floors and furniture, and taping edges. That preparation is most of what makes a paint job look finished. Ask how they protect the house, how long they expect the rooms to be out of use, how they clean up at the end of each day and what the house will smell like while the paint dries.

In an older house, there is a further question. Paint from many decades ago can contain lead, and disturbing it is work for professionals who know how to handle it safely. If you are not sure about the age of the paint in your house, mention it when you ask for a quote. A reputable painter will know what to do.

The person in charge of Easter: the eggs, the menu and the guest list. Keep them away from the painting decisions. They have enough on their plate.

The neighbours and friends who offer to help: say yes, but to the right jobs. Carrying furniture, taking curtains down and putting them back, collecting extra chairs and lending a car for the airport run are all useful. Painting the hallway in a hurry the weekend before Easter usually is not, and fixing an amateur job afterwards is a job in itself.

What it costs in effort

Prices depend on the size of the rooms, the state of the walls and the work involved, and only a proper quote will tell you. What I can describe is the effort, and the timing.

The most important thing is to finish well before the guests arrive. Paint smells for a while, rooms need airing, and furniture has to go back where it belongs. A spare room painted the day before your parents land is a room that smells of paint for their whole visit. Aim for a couple of weeks of margin, which also leaves room for the inevitable delay.

Then there is the disruption while the work goes on. One room at a time is easier to live with than the whole ground floor at once. If the kitchen is part of the job, plan simple meals for those days and keep the egg-dyeing for afterwards. Onion-skin dye and fresh paint are not a good combination, as anyone who has tried it will tell you.

Finally, there is the effort of putting the house back together. This is a good moment to edit. Not everything that came off the shelves needs to go back. The guests will notice a calm, fresh room far more than they notice the ornaments.

Leave the guest room until last when you put things back, and make it up properly: clean linen, a lamp by the bed, a hook for a dressing gown and an empty drawer. After a long flight, a freshly painted room that is also ready to sleep in is a better welcome than any speech at the airport.

For next time

Keep a note of the colours used in each room, with the date, and store a small amount of each paint for touch-ups after the visit. Write down which rooms took the most wear over the holiday, so you know where to start next time. And keep the onion skins in a jar from the start of Lent: it saves a frantic search the night before the eggs.