personally that's the way I'd go, then you can have your body smooth as a baby's ass and ready to go, because they do NO prep work. I've personally never gone to a discount painter, but there's several of them around, and you should be able to find one that would squirt it, heat cure it, then clear it, and heat cure that and you should be all set, defiately for under $500 if you don't pick an exotic color, and do all the prep work(removing trim, filling or pulling dings, and smoothing the body), I stess the exotic paint though, the nastiest paint I ever dealt with was porsche guards red, it was $400 a pint! there's more expensive house of kolor paints(I've heard of as much as $1000 a pint) but I've never touched them.