Project overview
This was new construction at 1440 10th St in Fairhaven, a building owned by Muljat Group. A very large open interior had been divided into offices with newly built walls, and in January 2025 we painted all of it: roughly 3,000 square feet of fresh textured drywall under an open ceiling grid. Our job was to take those raw walls to a finished, uniform color, a soft light blue.
Painting new drywall is a different job from painting over an older office. There's no failing paint to scrape or old patches to blend, but the surface you start with is much less forgiving. Bare paper, joint compound and texture all take paint differently, and every one of those differences shows if the prep is skipped. On this suite that meant protecting the floors and furniture, priming every wall with a tinted PVA drywall primer, brushing a clean cut line at the ceilings, corners and outlets, and rolling the walls out in Benjamin Moore Ultra Spec 500, a commercial-grade interior paint built for exactly this kind of space. It's the same careful interior painting process we use in Bellingham homes, run at the scale of a commercial suite.
Why new drywall needs a different approach
Raw drywall isn't one surface. It's two. The paper face and the joint compound over the seams and screws absorb paint at different rates. Put finish paint straight onto them and the compound drinks it in differently from the paper around it, so taped seams and patches show through as dull or shiny bands. Painters call that flashing, and bright overhead office lighting makes it hard to miss.
A primer made for new drywall evens that out. It seals the paper and the compound to the same porosity, so the finish dries to one consistent sheen. Texture adds one more wrinkle. On textured walls the line at the ceiling and corners has to be laid down carefully by brush, because the bumps in the texture make a ragged edge obvious from across the room.
One more trick on big new-drywall jobs: tint the primer. Plain white primer on white drywall makes it nearly impossible to see a missed spot, which painters call a holiday. Primer tinted toward the finish color shows every gap, so you can confirm full coverage before the finish goes on.
Bottom line: on new drywall, primer isn't an upsell. It's what keeps the seams from showing through the finished color.
Our process on this job
- 1. Protect floors and furniture. Drop cloths and paper went down on the floors, and the furniture in the hallway was covered before any paint was opened.
- 2. Prime the new drywall. Every wall got a PVA drywall primer, tinted so any holiday (missed spot) would stand out. That let us confirm full coverage across all 3,000 square feet before the finish went on.
- 3. Cut in. Brushed lines at the ceiling, in the corners, and around every outlet.
- 4. Roll the walls. Benjamin Moore Ultra Spec 500, rolled with an extension pole for uniform coverage, wall to wall.
- 5. Final walkthrough. A last check of the lines and coverage before the room was done.
Fairhaven Office — Project Photos
Timelapse: new drywall to finished office
The whole job in 29 seconds: loading up, rolling the new drywall, and the finished room.
Related work and services
- This project is part of our commercial painting service in Bellingham: offices, retail and storefronts, scheduled around business hours.
- Same prep, same care at home: see how we handle interior painting in Bellingham houses, and what it costs on our interior painting prices page.
- Walls not ready for paint yet? We also do drywall repair and texture matching.
- More work in Fairhaven: a Fairhaven exterior house painting project.
- Other commercial interiors: downtown retail, a medical-area office, and a Sunnyland office.