House painting in Danville doesn’t only involve the painting itself, but it also includes cleaning and prepping. Here are some invaluable tips to achieve a professional-looking finish.
The question is how much cleaning would you need to do before you start painting your interiors? The answer depends on the size of the room, or how much level of dirt your walls have. It will also depend on how much furniture you have, the number of fixtures and clutter that should be removed.
The first step is to remove as much of your furniture as possible from the room. If there’s any furniture that is too heavy or immovable, cover them instead.
In covering your immovable/fixed furniture, wrap them with canvas or cloth instead of plastic for drop cloths. Plastic sheets are certainly cheap, but they are slippery, hard to work on, and will be thrown away when they’ve been used. Canvas or cloth covering, on the other hand, absorb paint, aren’t slippery, foldable and highly reusable. Make sure that you cover the furniture completely.
Remove anything that hangs on the walls and ceilings such as picture frames, mirrors, curtains, and decorations. Take off the electrical and light switch plates by loosening them from the fixtures, and cover the fixtures with masking tape.
In cleaning the surfaces, many people may be too lazy to do exhaustive cleaning. They just wash the surfaces with a wet rag and then proceed to do the painting. But remember that a thorough cleaning will affect how the paint will do on your walls and ceilings.
Dirt can cause poor adhesion of paint, so it’s important to clean your walls and ceilings well. For surfaces that are quite soiled or often splattered with cooking oil, use a small amount a light amount of detergent. To make sure that your rag or sponge will be clean all over again, use two buckets of water — one is for the cleaning solution, the other is for rinsing the wall. When the water in your buckets is dirty, discard “used” water and fill the buckets with clean water again. Many people clean walls with a solution of vinegar and warm water. This method requires no rinsing. Aside from dust, there may be cobwebs as well that should also be removed.
If you find any other stains on your walls such as from pen and crayon marks, use a stronger solution to remove them. If you spot any dull glossy areas on your walls, smooth them out with fine sandpaper; remember to dust off the residues after sanding.
Check your walls to see if they have any cracks, nail-driven holes and any other surface flaws. Using a putty knife, extract any large plaster cracks or loose particles from the surface. Then fill these holes and crevices with a lightweight spackle (putty).
If your walls are showing loose or scaling paint, use a putty knife to remove it. After removing the peeling paint, sand the walls to smoothen the surface. Sweep the debris off the floor.
Cover your floors with drip cloths, preferably ones made of canvas or cotton. It’s also all right to lay newspapers around the edges of the room.
Priming depends on the condition of your wall. If your walls are already covered with the usual “builder’s white” paint which is water-based, simply coat a new paint over the old paint. Priming is necessary if your walls are coated with oil-based paint, or are semi-gloss/gloss. However, if you don’t want to do the priming job, choose a paint that has a priming solution included which requires only one coat.
Since semi-gloss/gloss walls tend to show more imperfections, it is important that you pay attention to the areas where you have applied spackling paste.
Apply masking tape on nearby walls, light switches, and woodwork, to protect them from the paint. Covers of light switches, electric plugs and doorknobs can also be removed temporarily.
As implied before, cleaning depends on the size of the room, or how much dirt your walls have, and how much furniture, fixtures and clutter that needs to be dealt with. But no matter how much cleaning your room needs, you can achieve a great paint finish on your house interior’s surfaces when you are house painting in Danville.
