This is Todd with Todd A Hess Painting Company. I’m here to talk to you today about how to get prepped for your do-it-yourself interior painting in York, PA.
So, the first thing I want to know is what area you’re painting and how much furniture you have. If there’s a large amount of furniture, you might want to remove some. Make sure you can reach all the areas you want to paint, the ceiling, the walls, and the trim.
When you have that decision, and you have the furniture removed that you can remove, go ahead and put the other furniture in areas where you can reach those areas that you’re going to be painting. So if you’re painting the ceiling and you have a light in the center of the room, you’re not going to want to put all your furniture directly in the center; you might want to split that up or put it to either side or something like that.
Throw some plastic over that furniture and start looking around at what you can remove for your blinds, curtains, light switch, and outlet covers. You’ll want to remove all that stuff; either cover it with plastic inside the room or remove it completely from the room.
If you’re painting your trim, you’ll want to ensure that you prep those trims by sanding them out. Most times it is a harder enamel product that’s on there. It could be a higher sheen or a semi-gloss finish on a lot of trim. You want to sand that out to get good adhesion with your trim product.
The walls when it comes to patching, the things that I would look for is any seams, nail pops, or nail holes. Nail holes and nail pops are something you’re going to want to use shrink-free spackling with. You can get that stuff at Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Hess Supply Co. That’s kind of readily available everywhere.
Nail holes are self-explanatory, but I would dig them out with nail pops. They’re usually the size of a dime; you can see them. They kind of show up when you look at your wall with a little light, so you might want to get a light just to shine on the wall if you want to get all the imperfections before painting. Dig them out with a 5-in-1 tool, a knife, or a utility knife.
Once you see the head of the screw, get a screw gun, screw it down tight, and maybe put a buddy screw next to it to hold it down more. As I said, you’ll use shrink-free spackling on stuff like that.
Now the seams, something where you have a crack showing somewhere, you’re probably going to want to, we call it veeing it out. You’re going to dig it out just a tiny bit, make a little bit of a channel inside of it. You can either use shrink-free on that and skim it out or if you think it’s a very big open crack, you’re going to want to use something like an ultra-thin FibaFuse mesh tape. That’s a really nice product; it’s self-adhesive on one side. You kind of just cut off how much you need, stick it over top of the crack, and then skim it out.
If something’s like that, I would recommend that you’re probably going to have to skim maybe two or three times to get it to look good. Kind of spread it out a little bit from the seam. Maybe three to four to five inches on each side, so you have a nice look at the end when you go to paint; you can’t see that area you patched a lot.
Also, with ceiling cracks, you add something else. You may see some areas on your ceiling or just a normal crack; you could probably use FibaFuse tape. That product kind of becomes part of the joint compound, and you don’t have to deal with mesh as much. It’s a little bit more difficult to deal with, though. You’re going to have to put a coat of mud on first, put it inside of that coat of mud, and then re-coat over top of it.
You can buy most of these products at Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Hess Supply Co; they’re readily available. But that is the basics of what to do to get ready for painting your project, depending on how big it is. I mean, there are other little or tinier things. You’re going to want to remove door handles so that you don’t get spritz over top of those door handles. You might want to put a little tape over your outlet covers and your light switches so you don’t get any spritzing from the roller cover. Little detailed stuff like that is always good to go above and beyond.
I think that that covers all the fundamentals. If you’re getting ready for a professional painter, most of that stuff will be done by a professional painting company. They’re going to move your furniture; they’re going to remove all your light switches and outlet covers. They’re going to remove your blinds and your curtains; they’re going to move the furniture to where they need it.
I believe here at Todd A Hess Painting Company that we’re trying to make it as easy for the consumer to hire us to come in and do the painting for them, so a lot of the prep part, you won’t have to do any of it. So if you have a project this winter and you want to hand it off to a professional, give us a call.
