Painting Is Getting Pricier

Petroleum Spikes Hit These Gallons, Too

Decorators are fond of saying that the cheapest way to jazz up a room is to repaint it. But that interior design trick has been getting a bit more expensive of late.

In the past couple of years, the price of paint across the board, from the least costly to top-of-the-line brands, has been climbing.

The chief culprit is petroleum, its byproducts and other raw and manufactured materials critical to the paint industry. The price of crude oil is up more than 25 percent since last July and has nearly tripled since July 2000. With the price now above $75 a barrel, and with gasoline at the pump well over $3 a gallon, there is no telling when, or if, paint prices will come down, industry experts say.

The increase covers “transportation costs, natural gas at the refineries that make the pigments, steel that is used for containers,” says Casey McCormick, president of Maryland-based McCormick Paints, whose family owns manufacturing plants in Rockville and Frederick as well as 25 retail stores in the D.C. metro area. “We use a lot of plastics for containers, which have also skyrocketed. And the resins that go into paint manufacturing have, over the last 18 months, gone up quite a few times.”

Washington Post