Home Improvement – How to Paint Your House

Painting the outside of your home isn’t as difficult as it once was. It can still be challenging, but you could save thousands by doing it yourself instead of hiring a professional.

Like many other projects, a good home design software package can get you pointed in the right direction. These programs can assist you with many aspects of planning, such as materials needed and budgeting. Two things that a computer can't give you a good feel for are color and finish.

To avoid unexpected results, try some experimentation to see how the paint will look. Save yourself a lot of money and wasted paint by trying a small amount of your chosen color on a well hidden part of the house.

Prepare the test surface as you would anything else. Scrape, sand and clean any excess paint or debris from the area. Allow a week for drying after application and, if possible, observe in sunny and overcast weather conditions. You may have to test in more than one area to get an accurate idea, depending on the shade in your test area.

Test with both latex and alkyd (oil)-based paints and compare the results. Latex would not even have been considered for exterior painting in the past, but in recent years it has become more durable and more widely used for outdoor work.

Although it isn’t quite as durable as oil based, latex paint is easier to work with and dries much faster. Latex also bonds with weather stripping easier. The fact that it breaths well can be good and bad. It allows moisture to come out of the wood, but this also means moisture can get into the wood as well. Cleanup requires only soap and water.

Being the more durable of the two, oil based is the obvious choice for doors, porches and steps. There are special restrictions in place for oil based paint today, so cleanup and disposal are considerably more difficult. You can be fined, in some places, for putting oil paint cans out with your trash. There are also special facilities that charge a fee for disposal in many areas.

A synthetic nylon roller is recommended for latex based paint. For trim work, synthetic bristle brushes should be used. Natural fiber bristles make spreading more difficult because they will absorb the moisture in this kind of paint. This type of brush is better suited for oil based paint, along with rollers made of lambs wool or some other natural fiber.

Rollers range from smooth to very rough pile lengths. A smooth roller should be used on a smooth surface. A rougher roller should easily cover a surface that is more porous.

To avoid the hassle of cleaning oil based paint in the middle of a job, place the brushes and rollers in a plastic bag and freeze them. Let them thaw out again an hour before you want to resume painting and away you go.

Before painting, prepare the area and remove or replace any rusty nail heads. Fill in any cracks with putty, and sand them after they dry. Consider placing old newspapers over your plastic drop cloths to allow drips to dry faster.

Take the weather into account, and plan on doing your painting during moderate temperatures and low humidity.

Happy painting!

         

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