When an interior paint job goes wrong, the homeowner almost always blames the paint. In our experience it is nearly never the paint. Modern coatings from any reputable manufacturer are good. What fails is the work that happened — or did not happen — in the days before anyone opened a can.
The most common complaint we get called out to fix is flashing. You painted the wall, it looked fine while wet, and once it dried there are dull patches exactly where the old holes were filled. That is not a coverage problem you can solve with a third coat. Joint compound is far more porous than the surrounding painted wall, so it drinks in the binder and dries to a different sheen. The fix is to spot-prime every patch before painting. It takes twenty minutes and it is the single most skipped step in the trade.
The second is peeling and chipping on trim and doors. Old trim in a Bronx or Brooklyn pre-war apartment might carry six or seven layers of paint, some of it oil-based, and the top surface is usually glossy and contaminated with decades of hand oil and cleaning product. New paint has nothing to grip. It needs to be washed, scuff-sanded to break the gloss, and primed with something that bonds to a slick surface. Brushing straight over it produces a finish you can peel off with a fingernail inside a year.
The third is cracks that come back. A hairline crack in plaster that is simply filled with compound and painted will reopen, because the crack is moving and the filler is not. It has to be opened up, taped so the joint is bridged, and then finished — otherwise you are repainting the same line every couple of years. In older city buildings with plaster over lath, the honest answer is often a full skim coat rather than a series of patches, because patching a wall that is failing in twenty places just gives you twenty visible repairs.
Then there are the visible-quality problems: wandering lines where wall meets ceiling, roller marks, and lap lines. Tape helps but tape alone does not produce a straight line — paint creeps under the edge unless the edge is sealed first. We cut most lines in by hand, which is faster than taping once you can do it and gives a better edge. Roller marks and lapping come from letting an edge dry before rolling into it, which is a technique problem rather than a materials one.
The honest summary is that preparation is most of the job. On a typical interior repaint, filling, sanding, caulking, masking, and priming take substantially longer than applying the finish coats. When a quote comes in dramatically below everyone else's, that gap is almost always the preparation being left out — and you will not see the difference on the day it is finished. You will see it in about eighteen months.
Planning an interior repaint in the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Queens? GM 5.0 Construction LLC gives free written estimates that spell out the preparation, not just the coats. Call (551) 300-8450.