Residential Painting

Go For The Pros When It's Time To Paint Your Home

Painting - how hard can it be? For people who want to paint their homes, either inside or outside, the idea of doing the painting themselves and saving money often seems like a good one. After all, if you take the job bit by bit, you can accomplish it. And if you've ever painted an item like a bookcase, a house might seem like it's merely a bigger version of that.

But that is not the case. Houses are completely different animals, requiring different types of paint and preparation - not to mention technique - than other items including playhouses and birdhouses. There's also a safety dimension that many people don't consider carefully. If you want to paint your house, you need an experienced professional painter to do the job. That professional, quality experience can eliminate a lot of problems and save you from many pitfalls.

Exterior Problems

How many stories is your house? Does it have vaulted or cathedral ceilings? Is it pretty much a box, or do you have eaves, dormers, and valleys? Unless you've got a tiny, one-story, boxlike home - basically a storage shed - the amount of work required to complete the job would be immense. You can't leave only part of the exterior painted if you started to get frustrated and tired; you have to finish the whole job. Many people paint and paint and paint until the enormity of the whole project hits them, and they end up either doing a very sloppy job or hiring a professional painting crew.

Safety is also a major consideration. On a multistory house, you'd need a very tall ladder to reach the upper portions. Your risk of falling and hurting yourself is greater than you think. If a professional painter falls, the company will have insurance to help the painter get medical attention. You'd also have the remaining crew who could finish the house. If you fall, you're not finishing the house and you'll be responsible for your own medical bills.

Another pitfall is poor site preparation and poor choice of paint type. This can result in peeling paint, mildew, and other problems as the weather takes its toll on the paint. You may not have removed the old paint properly, for example, resulting in unevenly painted surfaces. Worse, you might have missed signs of rot and mold, and then covered them up with paint. A professional crew can stop the job and show you what needs repair first.

Interior Mistakes

Not prepping rooms correctly is a big problem for amateur DIY painters. You have to tape over the edges of anything you don't want to be painted, and you have to remove light switch and outlet plates so that you don't accidentally cover the edges with paint, which looks messy and causes the plates to stick to the wall. Try to remove a plate later, and you end up chipping the paint. You could also end up creating messy borders around windows and doors because of an unsteady hand and a lack of practice with the paint roller. 

A professional crew knows how to prepare a room. If there is anything you need to do, like remove furniture, they'll let you know ahead of time. Otherwise, they'll go through and cover or remove items as appropriate. They'll also know when to put items back so that the new paint has time to dry and isn't disturbed.

Painters also have methods for covering a large amount of surface area without missing spots. Chances are, as careful as you may be, you could end up forgetting a corner or a spot near a baseboard (or the baseboard itself). That's an annoyance you don't need.

A serious issue is drywall repair. Before you paint, you'll have to repair holes and weak spots in the drywall so that the paint layer is smooth. You'll also have to remove old wallpaper and old adhesive lest you end up with raised strips in the paint layer. Unless you've done these tasks before, there's a chance you won't do them correctly. One little ridge of leftover wallpaper can ruin an entire wall. Let professional painters take care of this instead. They will remove everything properly and ensure the wall surfaces are in good shape.