Painting the inside of your home is a great DIY project that can freshen any room in your home. We understand just how important it is to you that your home looks good and a place where you want to be. That’s why it’s important that you know how to prep any room that you are considering painting. The last thing you want is for your finished job to look amateurish. The tell-tale signs that a professional didn’t do the job include paint spatter, missed areas, mottled color among other things. Westworld Painting wants you to be a success so here are a few steps that you can take to ensure that your finished project will look great and will last for years to come.
Remove What Furniture You Can
When a professional does a paint job, the last thing they are seen doing is stumbling over tables or stretching behind a couch and quite frankly, you shouldn’t have to be doing this either. This is why it’s important that you try and remove all the furniture you can. If possible try moving all of the furniture out of the room if you can. By doing this you ensure that none of the furniture will get damaged. If you can’t remove the furniture then it’s a good idea to try and move as much of the furniture to the center of the room as possible. Then for extra protection, get some sort of heavy plastic and cover all of the furniture with it.
Protect Your Floors
If you don’t want your hardwood floors or carpeting getting paint on them, it’s a good idea to make sure that you protect them. The best thing you can do for your floors is to get some painters drop cloths and spread them out over the floor all through the room that you’ll be painting. Even though plastic sheeting is much cheaper, they can slip and shift while you’re painting and you still might get paint on the floor. The canvas drop cloths once put down stay in place and protect your floors. These canvas drop cloths also keep the paint from soaking through, especially if you have an accidental spill.
Remove Everything From the Walls
Never leave any paintings, wall hangings or mirrors on your walls. Even though you might thing that saves you time, it’s only going to work if your wall hangings hang perfect on the walls and hide the unpainted areas. So, always remove every single thing you have hanging on your walls before painting. It’s a good idea to protect the items you’ve removed by wrapping them in some bubble wrap and then put them in a storage container until you’re ready to put them back up on your walls. After you remove all the wall hangings make sure that you remove all the picture hangers and nails and then fill in all the holes with some spackle and sand down before you start your paint job. Always make sure that the spackle is completely dry before applying the paint.
Clean Off Your Walls
A common mistake a lot of people often make is bypassing this step. They often wonder why clean the walls off when you’re going to be painting over everything? Well, it’s important that you take this step because clean walls give you a uniform surface and ensures you’ll get a nice smooth and professional looking paint job. Any dark smudges there might be on a wall can often show through the fresh coat of paint and even some things on a wall will actually change the consistency of your paint when you apply it.
You can clean your walls with just some water and a mild soap. If you have some tougher stains especially like the grease build-up you can get in a kitchen, you can use what pros use and this would be trisodium phosphate. You can mix this with some bleach and it will remove not only grease but also any mildew or stains left from mildew off your walls. Whatever you use to clean off your walls always make sure that you rinse the walls off good and then make sure that you give the walls plenty of time to dry before painting. If you want to speed up the drying you can use fans.
Remove All Switch Plates and Outlet Covers
Don’t try to cut corners by leaving the outlet covers and switch plates on. This will only lead to a non-professional look because there will be visible brush strokes all around these items. So please, make sure that you take the extra time needed to remove all of these in the room you’ll be painting. Make sure, for safety sake that you replace these items as soon as the paint around the area is dry because you don’t want any accidents. One wise thing you can do is to turn off the power to the room at the breaker box if you really want to be safe.
Taping Molding and Trim
Since you can’t remove the trim and/or molding, the next best thing you can do is to use painters tape to protect these areas. Taping is not really all that difficult, but it is very time consuming, so be patient, especially if you want a great finished look once you’re done. When you do the taping, make sure that none of the tape is on the wall that you want to paint. You only want the tape on the trim or molding. After you’ve painted your walls, don’t remove the tape until the walls are completely dry because you don’t want to mess up the paint job you worked so hard on.
Set Up a Work Area
Another common mistake many people make is that they tend to carry the can of paint around with them but this is a very efficient way of painting. What you should do is set up a “staging area”. This can be in the middle of your room or just outside of the room you’re painting. This is where you can pour your paint, store any open paint cans, and a place to clean your rollers and brushes. By doing this, you’re cutting down on any possible accidents or spills. An old folding card table or a couple of boards placed on a couple of saw horses make good staging areas.
When you take the time to prepare your room for painting will ensure that your paint project is going to look a lot more professional and it’s going to make you feel very proud of what you did. You’ll end up with a room that you can show off as well as enjoy for years to come.