Amidst all the hullabaloo and palaver of seeking professional help with their high painting costs and labor charges, there is a chunk of hope for the more enterprising of us. In more ways than one, it is sometimes practical and more importantly cheap to undertake a personal venture in painting your own house. Of course, as with all important ventures, there are some elementary steps that need to be taken into consideration. In this regard, let us home aficionados check out these simple albeit crucial guidelines on how to paint the interior walls of your house.
1. Preparing the walls
A smooth finish on the walls is directly related to the condition of the walls before you have started your painting. So, in this regard, one should always ‘prepare’ the wall before commencing with the paint job. The steps to undertake in this scope include proper cleaning, sanding and priming of the wall facades. Of course, it goes without saying that the cleaning part also includes removal of obtrusive stuff like wall hangings, pictures and other decorations from the wall surface.
2. Setting up a workstation
It is always wise to set up your equipment in a single zone, before starting your painting job. This workstation can have the necessary components like the tools, ladders, brushes, rollers, drop cloths, cleaning rags and even pails for carrying the paint. This station helps in a better co-ordination, especially when your are painting in a group. It also saves you time, given that all the bare necessary items required for painting are within your (and your partner’s) reach.
3. Quality check
This is where you should invest more money (since you are saving up on the professional crew), as better quality of equipment invariably results in a better finish. In this regard, high quality paintbrushes tend to deliver an even layer of paint onto the wall surface. The same choice goes with paint types too, and thus good advice on quality is always welcome. For example, if you want to paint your bathroom, it is advisable to go with water-based acrylics that absorb more humidity. On the other hand, semi-gloss paints are much easier to clean, and so can be used in high circulation areas like kitchen and living rooms.
4. How to use brushes
Finally, getting down to the true scope of painting, it is highly important to know on how to use brushes. But first we should prepare the brushes by dousing their bristles with water or even an appropriate thinner. Coming to their usage, mainly there are two types of brushes one will encounter while painting: the trim and sash type with pencil handles and the larger type with beaver tail handle. The first type as the name suggests can be held like a pencil with your first two fingers. This gives your better and swift control for those intricate and detail finishing. On the other hand, the larger type brush needs to be held like a tennis racket with a broader grip. This brush acts as the main component when painting much larger and flatter surfaces.
The using of brushes is not only limited to their grips, but also requires a primary level of expertise on how to dip them in paint and how to make the strokes. The trick is always to put up as much paint in the wall as possible, without spattering around in your work zone. In relation to this, the one-third dipping of the bristles in paint always helps.
5. How to use rollers
Using rollers is generally simpler than using brushes, even for the amateur painter. Their preparing method is the same as brushes by dampening the roller first with water (for latex paint) or a corresponding thinner (for other types of paint). The excess moisture content can be panned out on surfaces such as scrap lumber or craft paper.
Now comes the dipping part, which is very essential for any paint job. In this regard, one should make sure that he has filled around half of the well of his rolling pan and then set his roller onto the well. In the next step he should roll his roller along the pan slope, stopping short of the half filled well. Repeating this process for two to three times would ensure an appropriate quantity of paint to be taken in by the roller. Finally, he can dip his roller once more into the well before setting out for painting.
6. How to cover walls
The very first thing to remember when painting walls is to cover an entire facade without taking any break. This is because any disparity in time interval of applying paint might result in unequal drying up of particular sections. Now, once we are done with the whole facade, we can take a step back and survey the whole surface to check for any sort of smear or even missed spots.
As for strokes, one can choose top to bottom or sideways as per his preference. However, when using extension on the roller, it is always wise to cover a wide zig-zag pattern along the wall, so as to make the best use of the extended handle. Finally, one should also remember that if he is right handed, he should start from the room’s left hand corner; and if he is left handed, he should correspondingly start from the right hand corner.
