Interior painting: stairs, doors, frames and skirting boards

Our 7 permanently employed painters do the woodwork inside your home: stairs, balustrades, inside doors, door frames, the inside of window frames and skirting boards, at fixed prices per item or per metre. Exterior painting is always priced on request after we have seen the situation.

Walls and ceilings fall under painting walls in our price list, and in most Dutch homes they are part of the renovlies package anyway. This page is about woodwork: what we paint, why the preparation decides how long it stays good, and what it costs.

Behangservice Nederland has been working on Dutch interiors since 2010, from one location at Transistorstraat 7 in Almere and across the country.

What do our painters paint inside?

Woodwork is the part of your home you touch most. You use the door handle every day, you walk up and down the stairs, and you see the window frame every time you look outside. It also takes a beating: stairs are walked on, door frames get knocked by the vacuum cleaner and skirting boards catch every wet mop. That is why woodwork needs a different paint and a different approach than a wall.

These are the items we paint most:

• Stairs. Open stairs without risers and closed stairs, with or without sanding, optionally including the handrail and underside.
• Balustrades. Wooden balustrades along a stairwell or void, in lengths of 2 to 3 metres and 4 to 6 metres.
• Inside doors and door frames. Separately or together, with or without sanding.
• Window frames on the inside. Wooden frames, priced per frame of 5 to 7 metres.
• French doors to the garden. The inside at a fixed price.
• Skirting boards. Sanded and painted per running metre.

In a Dutch new build, the stairs, doors and frames are often delivered with only a primer coat. They look finished at first glance, but primer is not made to take daily wear. If you have just moved into a new house, our page on finishing a new build shows where the paintwork fits in the overall order.

Can you paint woodwork without sanding?

Sometimes, often not. A tin of lacquer and a Saturday afternoon seem enough to make a yellowed door white again, and on day one it looks fine. Whether that layer is still there a year later is not decided by the brush. It is decided by what happens before the lacquer goes on.

Lacquer on a smooth, glossy old paint surface has little to hold on to. On spots that take load, such as the front edge of a stair tread or the closing edge of a door, the new layer lets go first.

Sanding does two things. It makes the old surface dull and rough enough for the new paint to bond, and it removes loose paint, dirt and old drips so they do not show under the new coat. After sanding we make everything dust-free and grease-free, because dust and hand grease are as bad for adhesion as gloss.

When in doubt, we sand rather too much than too little. A coat that does not bond can only be fixed by taking it off again, and then you pay for the work twice. Which approach your woodwork needs, we assess during the free site visit, before any price is put on paper.

The order on site matters as much as the sanding. In a house where walls are also being done, the painter comes last in each room. Lacquer that is still wet attracts every grain of dust from sanding a wall nearby, and once it has dried in, it cannot be polished out. That is one reason we plan the trades ourselves rather than leaving that to you. On the day itself, our painters mask off hinges and handles, sand, clean, and apply the coat, and the woodwork then needs time to harden before it is used heavily. A painted staircase in particular should be used carefully for the first days.

Which paint do we use on stairs, doors and frames?

Lacquer, not wall paint. Wall paint is made for walls and ceilings and does not stand up to the wear a staircase or door gets. Lacquer forms a harder, closed layer that can take knocks and cleaning. We use Sigma or PPG lacquer.

You choose the colour. How many coats are needed cannot always be said in advance: covering a dark colour with white, or the other way round, often takes two or three. Our prices are for one coat, and the price list shows what a second coat costs; for skirting boards, for example, a second coat is from €4.99 per metre.

What does interior painting cost?

These prices come from our price list 2026/2027, excl. VAT, one coat.

Exterior work, such as the outside of doors, window frames and facades, is always on request. It depends on the condition of the wood, the access and the weather, and that cannot be captured in a fixed price. We look at it on site and give you a separate quote.

If the walls and ceilings need painting too, those are priced per m². Priming and painting walls in RAL 9010 or 9016 costs €18.99 per m² for one coat, with a second coat at €7.99 per m² extra. For larger areas we can also spray, which gives a very even finish on ceilings in particular. In a home with renovlies, the first coat on the walls is already part of the renovlies package.

A tip on VAT that is easy to miss: in a home older than two years, the labour is charged at the reduced 9% rate instead of 21%. Materials stay at 21%. Your quote works out the exact amount.

Why not just hire a handyman for the paintwork?

For one door, that may be the sensible choice, and we will say so. Small orders carry a surcharge of €249.99 on top of the €99.99 travel charge, which makes a specialist expensive for a single item.

It changes when the paintwork is part of a bigger job. A painter who works for the same company as the plasterer and the wallpaper hanger knows when the sanding in a room is finished and the lacquer can go on. A separate handyman has to guess, or wait. Our painters work in the same planning as our wallpaper hangers, and in a stairwell, where walls take as many knocks as the stairs, we often combine the paintwork with impact-resistant glass fleece on the walls. Our page on wallpaper for new builds explains the difference.