Painters near me understand why your home is important to you. They know that owning a home is one of your most significant investments and one of your life’s achievements. This knowledge is why their job is to give your home a new life by adding a fresh coat of paint.
But it’s not just giving your home a new life but also a longer one. Professional painters treat your home as if it were their own. And if you say why you need to hire a professional to paint your home is not just because you want it to have new colors. It’s also because you want your home protected from all the stains, dirt, moisture, and sunlight. What professional painters do is protect and beautify your home as if they do theirs.
How do the pros do residential painting so well?
It takes many years of experience and training before painters become certified professionals in painting homes.
They also know that time is money, so they routinely use trade secrets to help them figure out how to paint a room or entire home faster and more efficiently without making a mess or costly mistakes.
Here are some of their favorite painting tips and techniques:
1) Sanding away flaws
For the paint to stick uniformly to the surface, the surface must be smooth, clean, and clear from imperfections.
Sanding with an appropriate sandpaper or sanding tool will help smooth out spackling compound or drywall joint compound patches, flatten ridges around nail holes, and feather out patches to blend inconspicuously into the surrounding surfaces.
Sanding will also help remove bumps or rough surfaces in painted wood moldings, trim, and door and window casings. For sanding decorative woodwork and other intricate architectural details, try using a sanding sponge, as it can get into crevices and easily conform to contours.
The “grit” refers to the rating of the size of a sandpaper’s abrasive material. The higher the grit, the smoother the sandpaper’s finish – 40 is course, while 440 is extra fine. To give the walls a smoother finish, try using 220-grit sandpaper fitted into a hand sander or sanding pole.
2) Using tinted primer
Before painting the walls, the pros typically fill surface holes and patch cracks with joint compound. But they won’t paint directly over the patched area – otherwise, the compound will absorb the moisture out of the paint, leaving a dull and flat look. This problem is known as “flashing,” which will look noticeably different from the rest of the wall.
The possibility of issues when repairing or patching holes is where the importance of priming before painting comes into the picture. The primer will be a barrier between the patched surface and the topcoat. It will also allow the topcoat to adhere to the surface consistently across the surface.
Instead of using a white primer, pros tint it with a little gray or the topcoat color. A tinted primer does a better job concealing patches or surface imperfections and masking the old paint color, resulting in a more vibrant finish.
3) Using a paint extender
One of the telltale signs that a novice DIY painter does a paint job is the visible brush marks in the finished paint job.
Do you wonder how the pros manage to create a flawless finish? While they train in all aspects of paint, they also get a little help to create a smooth and uniform paint job, such as a paint extender (or paint conditioner).
A paint extender does two great things:
- It slows down the paint’s drying time, allowing you more time to do touch-ups or paint over freshly painted areas without committing ugly lap marks.
- It levels out the paint, practically eliminating brush strokes.
Professional painters use drywall, cabinets, doors, and woodwork paint extenders. Typically, it’s 8 ounces of paint extender per one gallon of paint, but it’s still advisable to read the can’s label just to be sure. If your paint is incredibly thick or if you’re painting in colder weather, you may add more paint extender, usually up to 16 ounces per gallon of paint.
4) Boxing paint to get a consistent color
When buying two or more cans of paint of the same color, chances are you will never get the same color. Slight variants in color and shade in cans of paint of the same color often happen. You will notice the difference once the paint dries on the surface.
While this isn’t a serious problem, the difference is noticeable and will probably get on your nerves. And that slight difference becomes evident if you open a new paint can when you’re halfway through covering the walls.
Pros address this problem by mixing several cans of paint of the same color in a five-gallon bucket to ensure color consistency. This technique is called “boxing” paint. They can then get paint directly out of the large bucket, eliminating the need to pour paint into a paint tray.
These techniques help professional painters near me achieve the quality paint finish that will provide beauty, protection, and long life to the homes they paint. They care about your home, so they treat it like they do theirs.