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When skilled decorators paint your house, the task looks temptingly easy and so simple. But in reality it is never as easy as it looks. Painting walls require a number of skills that you must learn in order to go DIY. On the positive side, you know these skills are after all not rocket science. You can master them with little effort and time under the guidance of the masters.
With the right training and skills, you can easily dip a brush into a pot of paint and then rub it on the wall exactly the way a pro does.
A well-skilled and experienced painters & decorator in London shares some excellent DIY painting tips that help you provide a massive upgrade to the appearance of your home.
DIY Painting Tips for Your Home
Tip #1: Never Consider Decorating Easy
Get rid of the mindset that painting walls are easy. If it were, there would certainly not be thousands of registered decorating contractors in London. The main fact is to have the right set of equipment and tools to perform the painting job successfully. When you know the skills to handle those specialized tools, you will surely feel confident in your mind about handling the task successfully.
But in case you do not have access to those equipment and skills or do not feel confident enough at the back of your mind, then you better should hand over the painting job to a professional. You can easily get a realistic quote for house painting online and a skilled painter will finish the job in no time, providing higher value of your hard-earned money. In that case, get at least 3 quotes from 3 different sources and never ever settle for the cheapest quotation.
Tip #2: Make Proper Preparations Before Starting Over
House painting is the kind of job that requires more preparation time than the time required for actual painting work. Technically sound decorators invariably invest 60 to 70 per cent of their effort on preparatory works and then they invest the rest on painting. When you spend lot of time on preparation, the core painting task becomes easier on its own. But what are the elements involved such preparatory work?
These include the following tasks:
- Labouriously scrapping away old paint
- Eradicating molds
- Filling up the beading gaps around the windows
- Use of filler
- Silicone filling cracks (technically called grouting)
You’ve to finish up all these work before opening up the first can of paint to provide a stunning finishing to your walls through paint work. If you fail to handle this string of work efficiently, you’re bound to feel frustrated and give up pretty soon.
DIY painting is not just about buying a can of any good paint and applying it to the walls and ceilings.
Tip #3: Focus on Quality
Whether brushes, rollers, paints or any other item related to painting is concerned, you should always go for the top-quality items that you can afford. This is even truer for paints. Successful decorators in London suggest using branded, top-quality paints in your DIY house painting projects. Branded paints, of course, cost you more but at the same time, their shine lasts long enough to provide you value for money. Similarly, you must avoid cheap-quality brushes. Those brushes hold much less paint and thus, you have to work double as hard to get a good finish on your wall.
Moreover, a cheap and low-quality brush keeps shedding its bristles constantly. As a result they leave their signature marks on your walls and ceilings that are hard to remove.
Tip #4: Finish all Edges and Cutting-ins First
Have you ever noticed a professional painter at work? Irrespective of whether they are painting an interior or exterior wall surface, they start their work with the place beneath the windows, edges, nooks, corners, and crannies. Once they finish painting these tiny zones, they concentrate on applying the bulk of the paint to the square wall surface. They follow this strategy because it makes the work much faster and easier.
You should better remember this technique while performing DIY home painting. There are also a few more things to remember.
- Start from the top of any wall and gradually work your way to the bottom while painting a wall.
- Dip only a quarter of the brush into the paint bucket. Else excess paint will flow out or drip from the brush causing unnecessary wastage of paint.
If you ever watch closely a pro at work, you’ll note his fingers are clean and not soiled with paint. Remember, the paint is meant to be on the walls and not on your fingers. It is a good idea to spread out a dust sheet or old blanket on the floor before starting the painting job. This saves your floor from being ruined by paint. When you ignore covering the floor before starting the painting work, you are compelled to spend considerable time and effort cleaning off the paint drips and spills from the floor surface. Similarly, you should make use of old newspapers and masking tape to cover the doors and windows too.
Tip #5: Follow a Professional Minutely
If you want to carry out DIY house painting just like a professional does, you should better change into a professional outfit along with start thinking and acting like a pro. That’s the best way to provide professional finishing to the walls and ceilings.
- Wear your old and rejected clothes that you won’t mind getting badly soiled.
- Get a paint kettle – it is a container with a handle; you carry paint in it and it’s easy to hold up a ladder.
- A painted area must be protected from drips and spills.
- You also need to protect areas that are not to be painted from spills and drips.
- Safely keep all your painting tools in a clean place.
- Make sure to clean each of them thoroughly every day after use.
- Move all furniture, frame hangings, and lampshades from a room before painting.
Paint Works London is a reliable name for interior and exterior decoration and painting in London. Skilled and experienced decorators associated with it suggest browsing the web for more helpful tips to make your DIY house painting project easier and more successful.