If any professional house painting company were to confide in you their secret to success, you’d be baffled to learn that the actual act of painting is the easiest part of the job. The real heavy work and yet the major determinant factor of a successful painting is preparation. Any form of painting requires its unique preparation process, be it interior, exterior, or roof painting. Failure to prepare adequately for a paint job will lead to visibly shoddy work, which can be demoralizing and prove to be a waste of time and resources. Whether you’re contemplating DIY or hiring a professional, knowing how to prep your home for a paint job is crucial. It will give you the best chance of knowing whether the professional you’ve hired is on the right track by quickly detecting flaws in the preparation process.
We’ll go through how you can prepare for both interior and exterior paint jobs.
Prepping Walls For Interior Painting
Painting your home’s interior is the perfect way to regain its elegance and glamour. There are many other beneficial reasons to do a paint job, for instance, increasing the value of a house or residential building you’re planning to sell. Let’s look at a few ways you can prep for a painting job.
- Clean the surfaces – For paint to fuse fast and effectively on the interior walls, thorough cleaning of all the walls and interior trims is necessary. Failure to do this may lead to early flaking of the paint, and the longevity of the painting will be significantly reduced. Luckily, cleaning interior surfaces is a relatively easy task as compared to the exterior. Most dirt and grime within interior walls can easily be cleaned with a simple detergent solution or wiped with a wet cloth or sponge. A significant advantage of cleaning is that you increase the possibility of detecting damages that weren’t visible prior. This will enable you to fix them all before painting.
- Cover the floors – To protect your floors from paint spillage during painting, you should cover them accordingly. How you do this will depend on the interior parts you’ll be painting. If you are painting the walls, you should cover an area at least 4 feet from the wall. You can choose to use either a protective canvas or a plastic covering. Each of them has its merits and demerits, for instance, canvas coverings may be easier to spread out than plastic covers, but in case of a large spill, the paint may seep through. On the other hand, plastic covers may offer full-proof on paint seepage but may pose a risk if you’re working with a ladder as it may cause it to slip. Amateur painters, in particular, should be aware of this to avoid potential injuries.
- Protect your furniture – If the room has any furniture, the first thing is to move them away. The easiest way to do this securely is to create a checklist, identify things that are more prone to be damaged by paint or the moving process, and make a special note when grouping them. If it’s impossible to move everything entirely out, you can group them at the center of the house and conceal them with a painter’s plastic; that is if you’ll only be painting the walls (you’ll have to move them out entirely if you’ll be painting the roof).
- Remove all wall sockets – It’s advisable to remove all socket outlets and switch covers if you want your painting results to appear professional. You may think it’s easy to navigate and paint around them, but it’s certainly not. There is usually no visible separation between the wall and the sockets, and paint is prone to spill on them.
Exterior Painting Prepping
Your home’s exterior is the first noticeable place within your home. Sprucing it up with some fresh paint goes a long way in boosting your home’s overall curb appeal. Below are some of the ways you can prep it up before painting.
- Get rid of contaminants -The first most crucial step before you start anything else is to test for lead. Lead was banned entirely in paints in Australia since 2010, but it’s still common in exteriors painted before the ban took effect. If you detect it, don’t try to scrape or sand it off. It’s prudent to engage the services of qualified professional painters trained on how best to deal with lead removal.
Another prevalent contaminant, especially in humid areas, is mould and mildew. Bleach will eradicate them quickly. Alternatively, you can use a degreaser which will remove not only mould and mildew but also dirt and grime.
- Wash the exterior walls – Thorough washing will do away with previous paint and ensure the new paint fuses effortlessly with the wall. A new painting atop the flaking old one will cause the fresh paint also to flake after it dries. You can employ the services of pressure washing for a more effective process.
- Sand and scrape the walls – This is probably the most tiring but worthwhile process of exterior prepping. It’s the ultimate procedure that will ensure that the new paint adheres perfectly to the walls and increases its longevity. This is especially vital if you’re working with oil paints.
- Make repairs – The power washing and scraping process will most likely expose damaged parts within the walls, especially wooden parts that may have loosened over time. Others may be gaping holes that need to be filled or joints and seams that need to be caulked.
- Prime the walls – Priming your walls is an important activity you shouldn’t ignore more if parts of your walls are wooden or made of porous material. Priming ensures porous walls don’t absorb any form of liquid or oils. The most important function it does is to increase paint adhesion.
These few tips will get you started on your home painting project. If you ever need the services of the most renowned painters in Brisbane, Queensland, feel free to check us out on our website at https://www.surepaint.com.au or call us at 0449 846 744.
