Painting The Interior Of Your House

1. Remove all the hardware in the room. Take down all the decorations and then scan the walls for any nail holes or thumb tacks – remove these. Take off the electrical outlet covers. You should turns off the circuit breakers before you do this. A great idea for cleaning the outlet covers is to put them in the dish washer.

2. If you are painting a room, like a bathroom, its a good idea to lightly wash the walls down to clean them. Also, if the room you’re painting is dusty or dirty – clean them. Paint does not stick well to dust and dirt. Its also a good idea to vacuum the carpets before you start painting – you will be crawling on your hands and knees when doing your cut ins.

3. If you’re not a pro with a brush, use blue painters tape to mask around anything that should not be painted. To make the job faster you can purchase hand maskers that put the painters take right onto sheets of paper or plastic thus letting you mask larger areas. Paper mask any wood or vinyl flooring and then put drop clothes down over the carpeted areas.

4. Next step is to fill in any nail holes in the walls with spackle. Put some spackle on the tip of your finger and mush it into the hole. Wipe the area clean so the spackle lays flush to the wall. You can also use a putty knife to spread your spackle into the holes, but this generally only works well on smooth walls. The spackle will dry to a white chalky color. Sand it so that none of the spackle is sticking out from the wall, but is only filling the hole. You may want to dab some primer on these spots using feathery strokes all around the hole.

5. Caulk any areas that need to be caulked. Keep you finger on the release button so that when you let go the flow will stop. Fill in areas like trim around windows and doors, baseboards and cracks. With your finger wet, run your finger down your caulk line to smooth the caulking. Then use a damp rag to go over the smoothed caulk line to give it a finished look. You should wait at least 12 hours before painting over the caulking to allow for drying.

6. Before you start rolling the walls with paint, you should do your “cut ins.” Cut ins are areas like painting up to base boards, window trim, corners and around electrical outlets. Use a small sash brush for this work. When using a brush you will want to fill a paint bucket with only one inch of paint. This also serves the purpose of being more difficult to spill the paint in the bucket.

7. When getting ready to roll the walls, its a good idea to pour your paint into another container like a paint tray. As a pro, we find it easier to use 5 gallon buckets with “bucket screens” when we use rollers. But trays work well too.

8. The first step to rolling your walls is to load the roller with paint. You want to roll the roller in the paint so that it covers all the way around the entire roller cover. Roll it against the paint tray or roller screen to remove excess paint and let it sit for a minute or two. This lets the paint soak into the roller cover. Once you have let the roller sit for a minute, re-apply the paint to the roller cover and remove the excess paint again – now the roller is loaded.

9. Begin by making an M pattern on the wall. Be careful not to apply too much paint to the wall. You will have better results if you apply two thin coats of paint as opposed to one thick coat. Apply the first coat of paint, then a second, until the color is solid and uniform.

10. The last part of the project is brush painting your floor boards and window and door trim. When painting these areas, use long brush strokes. You can also use a little paint conditioner to help the paint level out and reduce brush lines.

Article originally published at Source by Erick E Clements