Repainting your home’s exterior or interior is the best way to enhance the look of your home. And hiring a professional painting contractor in San Diego, California is the best way to go. But if you want to take the DIY route, you should note the most popular and costly mistakes that might happen during your painting project.
Repainting a home is a major project, and can be quite challenging to most DIY enthusiasts and even seem impossible to newbies. However, if you’re a DIY master and simply must handle the job on your own, keep the following most popular mistakes in mind.
1. Improper preparation
The final results of any painting project are always as good and the preparation process. If you’re an eager and impatient DIY painter, chances are you will forget or be tempted to skip some important wall preparation steps. If you’re painting the exterior, start by scraping away any old, chipping paint and washing the wall. If you’re working on an indoor project, vacuum around your baseboards. Additionally, consider the quality of your surface and make any necessary repairs.
2. Not protecting your house
After you’re done with scrapping and cleaning the wall, makes sure your entire workspace is well covered. Paint has a nasty habit of ending up all over the place, so you need to protect against spills, drips, and sprays. This is even more important if you’re painting your interior –you should move all your furniture, cover cabinets and other fixtures, and place drop clothes under the walls that you’re painting.
3. Skipping the painter’s tape
A painter’s tape is a must for DIY painters, if you want to get those crisp edges and a professional-looking result. If you’re not a detail-oriented person, as the case is with most DIYs, then taking time to apply painter’s tape around the perimeter of your surface will probably be a challenge. But trust me, it’s worth it. Be sure to use the painter’s tape, not just any other tape. Lay the tape in straight lines, seal it tightly along the surface and remove it before the paint dries completely.
4. Forgetting Primer
Before you even open that paint can, apply a coat or two of a high quality primmer suitable to your wall material. A primer helps prepare your surface for the paint, ensuring the paint sticks more easily and evenly. It also ensures that the true color of your paint shows out, in some cases blocking stains and traces of old paint.
A few paint brands offer two-in-one paint and primer products, which makes your work one step less. However, if you have a severely stained surface, you may want to just use the traditional primer followed by the paint. For better stain blocking or when transitioning from dark to light colors, tinting your primer with a bit of the paint will help prevent old colors and stains from bleeding into your new layer of paint.
5. Choosing the wrong paint
Choosing your paint may seem like one of the easiest and fun parts –but it’s not. You need to consider the color, type and quantity of the paint as you choose.
The type of paint you choose will be based on many factors, including the space you’re painting, the item you’re painting, and what type of paint or surface you’re covering. For instance, paint designed for painting outdoors are different from those meant for indoors. Indoors such as the kitchen and bathroom may need moisture resistant brands while outdoors will need UV resistant brands.
Choosing the wrong color is probably the biggest mistake you can make. Most of the time, you might make the right choice best on a shown color strip, but then once you paint the walls, it doesn’t look anything like what you pictured. You can avoid this by testing your wall with a small test sample before going full scale.
Other than color, you also need to consider the sheen of the paint, which refers to its finish. Do you want a satin-looking finish, glossy finish or something matte and flat? And then finally, the quantity. You should calculate how many gallons of paint you’ll need to complete your project in advance.
Bottom line
Probably the last mistake that most homeowners in San Diego, California make is not consulting a professional. After noting the above mentioned mistakes, the second most important thing is realizing that painting your home is a complex project that needs the help of a painting expert. With that said, if you need any kind of help with your residential painting project, reach out to us and we will be more than happy to help.