When painting the interior of your home there is a lot to know and a lot to plan. The process of picking the right color can already be stressful enough. Let alone making sure the process goes smoothly from start to finish.
Luckily for you, we want to create this blog to help identify some common interior painting mistakes to avoid so that your next interior painting project goes as smoothly as possible.
Not Using Drop Cloths/Covers
Drop cloths/covers are an essential tool for making sure that a paint job stays neat and comes out looking great. They help keep paint off of a customer’s belongings such as furniture, carpets, and flooring.
Most of the time the room you are having painted is not going to be empty, but where do you put the furniture? You don’t have to move all of the furniture out of the room. Simply move all of the furniture to the center of the room away from the walls and cover your furniture with a drop cloth/cover.
Another thing that is necessary to cover with a drop cloth is the floors. Hardwood, carpet, tile, it doesn’t matter. All types of floors need to be covered. You never know what could happen. If a gallon of paint spills, it will be much easier to wrap up the drop cloth than to scrub it off of the floors.
At the start of every job, the first thing we do is to make sure that everything that needs to be covered with a drop cloth/cover is covered and secured. This ensures that all of our customer’s belongings will be safe from paint splatter.
Not Taking Enough Time To Prep
Some painters will say that the most important part about a good paint job is doing a superb and thorough job on the prep work. We could only agree with that statement! Thorough prep work ensures a clean and even surface for the paint to properly adhere to your walls, trim, or ceiling.
On the interior jobs that we take on, we make sure to clean the surface of anything we are going to paint, scrape any flakey or peeling paint, spackle the holes or imperfections, then sand everything until smooth. If you want to read more about how we prep walls for interior painting, Click Here!
Painting In The Wrong Order
Most of the time, it is best to hit more than 1 bird with 1 stone, so when painting a room you might as well paint your ceiling, trim, and walls all at the same time. Yes, we said it in that order because that is the exact order in which you should paint a room.
We start with the ceilings because it is highly likely that paint will splatter onto the walls and trim. Then we move on to the trim because the trim is harder to cut than walls which means that we are allowed to get some paint on the walls and it will be ok because it will be covered up later. Then we cut the edges of the wall, and cover the rest of the area with a paint roller.
This order of painting has never failed us because it allows us to work efficiently while still producing a high-quality finished product.
Using A Paint Brush On Walls
You never want to use a paintbrush to paint an entire wall. The only time a paintbrush should be used on a wall is when someone is cutting the wall near the ceilings and trim or when you are painting the corners of a room.
Other than that, you never want to use a paintbrush because you will be left with unsightly brush streaks. Instead, you should always use a paint roller when painting the center areas of a wall. The final product will look much better and the job will get done quicker.
Choosing The Wrong Paint
Walking into a paint store can be overwhelming right? There are tons of colors to pick from, a plethora of paint finishes to choose from, and countless brands to narrow down.
But don’t let all of that stress you out too much. 3/4 of the paint in that store won’t even work for your interior painting project anyway. As long as you are in the interior paint section you should be ok.
Paint comes in all different types and finishes. The types and finishes are going to vary from home to home. Check out our other blog named “Choosing The Right Paint Finish” to learn more on what you can do to find the perfect paint finish for your home.
We hope this blog helps you understand some of the uncertainties of interior painting. Our team has been doing this for many years so these mistakes are in the past! Give us a call at (508) 250-7272 or visit our website if you are looking for a painter in the Massachusetts area and we’ll send someone out to give you a FREE ESTIMATE.