4 Critical Things To Consider Before Buying a Home
Should You Paint Before Moving Into Your Nashville Home?
By Brendon Sherwood · Updated July 2026
Paint before you move in. Almost always. An empty house is faster, cheaper, and produces a better finish than the same job done around furniture. If you've just closed on a place in Nashville and you're deciding what order to do things in, this is the one that's easy to get right.
Here's why, and the handful of cases where the answer flips.
An empty room is a cheaper room
Most of what you pay a painter for isn't paint. It's labour, and a big share of that labour is protection — moving furniture to the middle, wrapping it, laying drop cloths, taping off, then putting it all back at the end of every day.
Strip that out and the same room takes noticeably less time. On a full interior, the difference between an empty house and a lived-in one is usually a day or two across the project.
You're also not paying anyone to work carefully around a sofa that could have simply not been there.
The finish is genuinely better
This is the part people underestimate.
In an empty room a crew can spray trim, doors and built-ins instead of brushing them. Sprayed trim has no brush marks — it's the difference between "painted" and "finished." Doing it with furniture in the room usually isn't practical, so you end up brushing, and brushing is always a compromise.
Same with cut lines. A painter working an open wall from a ladder placed wherever it needs to go cuts a straighter line than one leaning over a bookcase.
You find the problems before they're buried
Prep is where paint jobs succeed or fail, and prep is when you discover things. Nail pops. Old water stains that bleed through. Drywall seams that were never finished properly. Trim that's been overpainted so many times the profile has disappeared.
In an empty house, all of that gets found and fixed while it's accessible. Once your furniture's in, the discovery still happens — it just happens later, costs more, and involves moving everything again.
Nashville-specific: plaster and older homes
If you've bought in East Nashville, Sylvan Park, 12 South, Inglewood or anywhere with pre-war housing stock, this matters more.
Older Nashville homes often have plaster rather than drywall, and plaster needs breathable primers and a gentler approach. It also hides more surprises. We've opened up walls in Five Points and Lockeland Springs and found repairs that took an extra day nobody could have quoted for from a photograph.
An empty house gives you room to handle that properly. A furnished one turns it into a scheduling problem.
When to paint after you move in instead
Three genuine exceptions.
You don't know what colours you want yet. Living in a space for a few weeks tells you things a paint chip can't — how the light moves through the room, which walls you actually look at. If you're unsure, waiting is better than repainting.
You're renovating first. If walls are coming down or a kitchen is going in, painting beforehand means painting twice. Do the construction, then paint.
Closing and move-in are the same week. Sometimes there's simply no gap. That's fine — a good crew works around furniture every day. It just costs a bit more and takes a bit longer.
What to do if you've got a gap
Even a week between closing and the moving truck is enough for most interiors.
The sequence that works:
Book the estimate before you close. Walk the house with your painter during the inspection window if you can.
Prioritise the rooms that are hardest to paint later — anything with built-ins, tall ceilings, or a staircase.
Do the trim and doors while it's empty, even if you're leaving the walls for now. That's the part you can't easily redo later.
Keep the touch-up paint. Label it by room and store it somewhere dry.
The short version
Empty is cheaper, faster, and comes out better. If you have a gap between closing and moving in, use it.
If you're closing on a place in Nashville and want to know what it would cost, we'll walk the house with you and put it in writing. Free, no pressure.
Call 615-975-6464 or request a quote.
Brendon Sherwood is the owner of The House Painters, painting Nashville homes since 2010.