SETTING THE TONE : Don’t Touch That Brush Until You Know Exactly What to Do
A successful paint job starts long before you or someone you hire picks up a brush. Here are the steps that professionals recommend for a paint job you’ll be happy with long after it dries.
Ponder
Spend time thinking about what you want to accomplish. Do you want to make your house look bigger, disappear into the landscape or stand out boldly from its neighbors? Look at the whole property in relationship to its parts and to rest of street.
If the house next door is chrome yellow, don’t paint yours lime green. If yours is landscaped with yuccas and succulents, don’t paint a New England cottage scheme in slate blues and white trim. Make the color scheme part of the package.
Plan
Make a sketch of the house and yard and use colored markers to rough out several color schemes.
Think of places where easily added architectural trim--such as surface mounted vents, window boxes, shutters or lattice work--could be installed to provide a balancing touch of color.
Don’t forget the back yard, where so much time is spent in summer. Don’t use a light, cool color scheme everywhere else and then bury the rear of the house under a massive dark brown patio cover.
Make a list of everything you will need.
Purchase
Take your list to the paint store and buy everything you’ll need at once. Err on the side of generosity. It is much better to have a gallon of paint and three roller covers left than to run out at 7 p.m. on a Saturday with half a wall or 10 feet of fascia board over the front door still to go and company coming early Sunday.
Whether you are buying at a paint store or a home improvement center, don’t skimp on paint or brushes. Cheap brushes shed bristles and leave tracks in the paint, and they don’t hold as much paint as high quality brushes, so you have to keep going back to the bucket, increasing muscle-wearying arm movements and multiplying the chance for drips and spills. And inexpensive paint costs less because it has less of the stuff that colors your walls and woodwork, so you have to use more. Poor quality paint isn’t likely to resist sun fading as well or last as long as a high quality paint.
Dropcloths and painters tape are essentials--they keep paint off of things you don’t want painted and eliminate hours of cleanup work after the painting is done.
If you have to cover patios and sidewalks that you’ll be walking on, use heavy plastic, paper or even canvas cloths to minimize tearing. Use tape to cover the edges of trim and glass that adjoin areas being painted--the goal, again, is to avoid slop-overs and minimize cleanup.
Tell the salespeople at the paint store what surfaces you are painting which colors. They can recommend the proper rollers, brushes and paint sheens--flat, satin, semi-gloss or gloss--for the materials and the look you are trying to get.
Prepare
To professional painters it is a cardinal rule, to most homeowners a massive and unexciting chore. But it cannot be said too often or too forcefully: The key to a successful paint job is preparation.
The best paint in the world won’t stick for long to an inadequately cleaned and prepared surface. And there is little as disheartening as an expensive and time-consuming paint job that has to be redone in two or three years because an extra day or two of prep work wasn’t done.
* To get rid of dust, dirt, cobwebs and the green mold that often starts growing on the stucco close to the ground, wash stucco and masonry with cool water and a scrub brush or fine wire brush before painting.
* Scrub wooden surfaces and degloss shiny paint with sandpaper or chemical deglossers. Scrape cracked, loose, peeling or bubbled paint down to bare wood and then feather the edges of the bare spot and prime it.
* Clean out runners and slides on wood and metal windows and mask them off so they’re not painted shut.
* Cover landscaping and hardscapes--patios, porches, walkways--with dropcloths. If a fence or gate touches the house at any point and isn’t supposed to be the same color, use tape or a long thin piece of wood to mask off the fence material.
Paint
Make sure you apply the paint evenly. On a hot day wet down stucco or masonry walls to keep the paint from drying before it can soak in.
Paint the main color first, then do the trim.
Make sure that trim and accent colors aren’t just applied to the face of the molding or other feature they are used on.
In other words, paint the edges of window and door moldings and other trim pieces with the trim color, not the base color on the siding.
