Home Improvement Tips from a Painter in Sacramento

A highly esteemed painter in Sacramento has a few tips for the homeowners out there that want to improve their homes without spending too much money or putting themselves in danger. If you take the time to do things right and make sure that everything is properly prepped before you attempt to do any home improvements, you will most likely have a successful upgrade of your property.

Prepping The Area

There are tons of things that you can do to improve your home. One of the most popular ones is to put a new coat of paint on it. Over the years your paint job can accumulate a significant amount of oils and dust through the atmosphere and other elements. If you are going to paint the exterior of your home or shed, make sure that you take the time to prep the area before you do.

You can pressure wash the area, and if you don’t have a pressure washer you can either rent one or hire a professional painting contractor to pressure wash it for you. The main thing is that you thoroughly rinse off the exterior surface that you will be painting on, or the paint that you cover it with could end up peeling off within a couple of months.

Taping Off the Trim

When you do a paint job on your home it is a good idea to tape off the areas around the trim where you don’t want to get a different colored paint on the area. If you have light-colored paint with a dark-colored trim, you don’t want to get either mixed up with the other, or else it looks really bad. The best thing that you can do is get yourself some high-quality painter’s tape, like Frog tape, and tape off the areas that you want to protect from off-colored paints.

When you put the tape on the surface, be sure that you get it close to the edges and very tight. You don’t want to allow the paint to seep underneath the seal and “bleed” into the other paint.

You also want to make sure that you pull the tape off of the paint before it is completely dry. If you don’t do this you wll have dried paint stuck to the tape when you pull it off, and it will cause the rest of the paint on the surface to tear off with the tape and ruin your whole paint job. selection of bamboo blinds All it takes is a little bit of a mistake to ruin a whole day of work.

Brushing the Corners of the Trim

After you have successfully applied the painter’s tape, it will be time to apply the paint to the trim. When you do this, be sure to hold your brush at the correct angle so that you don’t smear the excess paint into the established paint, or that you cause your brush to smush paint under the tape. It takes a gentle, experienced hand to apply trim paint sometimes. However, if you carry a wet rag at all times you may be able to wipe away excess paint before it damages the other paint if you get to it fast enough.

Painting Large Walls

If you have a large home, you will probably have some big walls to paint on the exterior. Don’t let it intimidate you, but don’t try to paint the whole thing with a paintbrush either. Unless you have several months to kill while you paint. You figure that the biggest paintbrush you will find is about 6 inches wide, at the most. You know you will have to continually dip the brush into the paint bucket as you go. If you paint a 75 square-foot wall (and that is not so big) with only six-inch coverage at a time it will take you a long time, and a lot of work to finish just one wall.

The best way to paint large exterior surfaces is to either use a roller or get a sprayer. Rollers are not very expensive, and you can get a roller pan for pretty cheap too. All you have to do is pour some of your paint into the roller pan, roll the roller through it, get rid of all the excess paint on the brush by rolling it on the flat part of the pan, then get to painting. You will be surprised at how much area a paint roller can cover in a quick amount of time.

Home Improvement Tips

Even a concrete contractor hires a concrete delivery company to deliver its concrete because they are not equipped to carry around the wet concrete all day long in order to do their work. Sometimes it is best to hire a professional to do the things that you need to be done. Other times, you can do part of the job yourself, and hire a little help if it’s necessary. Trust your own judgment, if your task seems like it is beyond your skill set, you may want to pay a pro before you cause more damage than it would cost to get it done in the first place.