Prepping For Paint

Your paint is chipping off your home’s wooden siding. Your home looks withered, weathered, and beaten down. It’s time to paint. You dream of new hues, your home is a blank canvas. With a tabula rasa, a blank slate, you saunter to the nearest hardware store or paint shop for the best colors to suit your abode. It’s exciting, butterflies bubble up in your belly as you ponder the possibilities. Maybe you’ll go with maroon siding, and white trim: Classic. Or perhaps you’re thinking of deep dark eggplant purple alongside a lively green trim: Modern. Finally you decide on the perfect colors for your home… a rusted, cloudy seafoam for the siding, gray edging, and bright bold brown-mustard yellow for the door. Now, there’s prep work to be done. It’s time to peel away chipped paint, sand down imperfections, power wash your surfaces, dry, and paint.

Peeling Paint

With walls of paint peeling away, you’ll want to pick up some scrapers. Scrape away loose paint, paint bubbles, and any other imperfections off of your wooden siding. You don’t have to make your wall perfectly smooth yet, the next step is to sand! Feel free to check out the video below to learn about some easy-to-use scrapers that are on the market. As always, be cautious if you have to climb a ladder to reach high-up surfaces. Cover your landscape with drop cloths to collect paint as it falls.

Sanding Your Surfaces

Get yourself a disc sander and a detail sander to make sanding edges a snap. Sanding your home’s wooden siding will leave dust particles along your walls, so you’ll have to power wash your surfaces (our next step). Be sure to wear a mask to avoid breathing in dust particles.

Power Washing

Next, rid your surface of dust and other loose paint with pressure washing. You can call on Big Clean of Charlotte, North Carolina, to pressure wash all of the debris off of your wooden siding. We can pressure wash the entire surface of your home in a jiff. You’ll want to let the surface dry thoroughly before it’s time to paint.

Painting

Next, it’s time to paint! If you’re doing it yourself, you’ll need the right tools and preparation. First things first, the tools you’ll need: Grab a few drop cloths to cover your landscape, deck, and anything that doesn’t need droplets of paint. Next, grab brushes and rollers. Consider getting an extension for your roller to make high-up places a snap. Of course, you’ll need a ladder if your home is two stories or more (please be cautious!). Most importantly, you’ll need paint. Consider purchasing a 5- or 10-gallon bucket to mix all paint of the same color to ensure uniformity. Don’t forget a stir stick (or you can purchase a blending attachment for your hand-held drill if you want to make mixing easy). You’ll also need to purchase painters tape to mask off the corners, windows, and other edges around your home.

We’ll go over the steps you’ll need to take for do-it-yourself painting in our next blog, so check back!