How Nolan Painting Schedules Jobs

One of our first promises to you, our customer, is to start and finish on time. As you know most contractors are notorious for running behind schedule. We have as well.  

It proves to be very difficult to schedule a job that has so many variables associated with it. There are many reasons a schedule can get disrupted. Over the last year, the Covid pandemic and all that’s associated with it was the biggest challenge. Most years the weather is unpredictable. Hiring enough labor always proves to be difficult. Customers add things to the scope. And sometimes jobs get canceled and postponed. Sometimes things just take longer than expected.

We cover parts of five counties: Bucks, Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, and Philadelphia.  We have broken up this into four territories covered by our four teams. Each team/territory has its own schedule based on its size and how many projects it has. So there may be openings for an exterior in Chester County for July or August but we may be booked for exteriors in Bucks County till September. 

We also schedule interiors and exteriors differently. Interiors are predictable and generally not as large, so we want some scheduled every week. As a result, our interior schedule is not usually as backed up as our exterior schedule. 

Since we can’t predict the weather long-term, we use a formula based on over 40 years of past history for how much good painting weather we can expect throughout each season.  Spring can be rainy and cold and we generally don’t get started till mid-April. Summer can be hot and stormy but it is our peak exterior season. Autumn can have the best weather, but it starts getting too cold to paint by mid-November. In the winter we only do interior projects. 

 Some years the weather does not act normal. In 2018, we had a very rainy summer. It rained most of the week, week after week. In 2020, we got an early mid-march start and then… you know what happened. This past February, we had 4 snowstorms and missed a few days.

I often say the average temperature and amount of precipitation is an average of extremes.

So for exteriors, we tend to be conservative and schedule out. We figure it will rain every week and most weeks it does.  If the weather is exceptionally good we might be able to start a job sooner than we will move it up in the schedule. It is always better to pull a job up than push a job back.

All the best.