Budgeting for a paint job

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91RS

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If you want it to actually look good when you’re done, $10k-$15k. All the trim, mirrors, door handles, fascia’s, roof antenna, etc. will need to be removed and masked off which is a huge amount of work. I spent $5k getting the hood and roof repainted which required sanding down to bare metal, blending and clearing the front fenders, and painting a new front fascia. I took off all the trim pieces, headlights, etc. myself and swapped everything over to the new fascia and installed myself. That saved me about $1k in labor.
 

petethepug

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Back in Black. That’s the color to do a respray. I did a 66 Mustang in my teens from yellow to black and removed all the trim. The pop you get after replacing the trim against perfect paint is such an amazing contrast.

The black paint on your Tahoe is amazing. I had our 08 YXL Denali color sanded, polished, respray on the hood and the nose of the roof. Paint was $1.3k and full color sand details and exterior resto was $8h.

Most of the paint was paper thin after the polish but it was flawless all around to the new owner who got the truck detailed to insanity.

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Rocket Man

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I was looking at 10k plus for my 08 Silverado. This is from a friend who owns a body shop. He said he couldn’t give me any great deal because he could make way more doing 6-8 smaller insurance jobs. A full repaint takes up so much shop time most won’t even do it.
 

91RS

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I was looking at 10k plus for my 08 Silverado. This is from a friend who owns a body shop. He said he couldn’t give me any great deal because he could make way more doing 6-8 smaller insurance jobs. A full repaint takes up so much shop time most won’t even do it.

Yeah, most places won’t do a full paint job. I wanted to get a price on doing the entire truck since I figured the doors wouldn’t be far behind and no one I called would do it.

I decided to put clear bra on the tops of the doors to block the UV since that’s where it’ll start and I use a ceramic spray coating (Technician's Choice) at every single wash, which is weekly now that I’ve switched to rinseless. Hopefully that will get me many years down the road but I figured I could get one side painted at a time if it comes to it and it wouldn’t hurt too bad. But, since GM is discontinuing all the parts to keep the truck on the road, it may not even matter. Just another reason the GM’s I have are likely my last.
 

tooleyondeck

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Just the paint materials will be around 2k, not sure what kind of prep and spray he will be getting for the remaining 3k.
Unless you're doing a full restoration or there is serious paint damage across the whole car (industrial fallout for example) you rarely need to do a full repaint. OP said he has some faded and chipped spots. 99% of body shops will just respray/blend those areas and re-clear the whole truck, if requested. In most cases, you wouldn't need to re-clear everything; the rest of the car can be paint corrected to make it look close to new without a full respray. It's very location dependent and from reading a lot of people's experience here I'm guessing where I live has pretty good going rates by comparison.
 

strutaeng

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Geez, no wonder people drive around with vehicles with faded/worn paint, LOL.

I've painted a hood/fender and turned out "okay". Not showroom quality but better than driving a truck with mismatched color panels.

My 99 Silverado has started to peel on the clearcoat on the roof. My 06 Suburban has some nasty door dings from the PO. I think it may be better to just repaint the entire truck to fix door dings, etc that accumulate over the years of daily driving it on both trucks. I wouldn't see myself spending $10k on a truck that's only worth $5k in my case. Just doesn't make sense to me. But I understand folks have different points of view.
 

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