If you own a house, chances are you have painted the outside a time or two. If you are like most people, you hated doing it. It may have started out fun, but by the time you finished, there may have been yelling, screaming, and cussing involved. So, if you can not avoid it, the best thing to do is make sure you do it right, so you have to do it less often.
First thing you need to do is to inspect the house. What areas need to be repaired? Are there window sills that are rotten? Are there any bad corner boards? Do you need to replace any pieces of siding? If the answer is yes, then either go to the big orange store down the street, or call the handyman. There is no sense in painting over bad wood. Its just stupid. Paint is good for one thing: keeping out the elements. Not holding together your house.
If you don't have any bad areas, or you have accomplished step one, then it is time to clean. You need to power wash the surface to remove any dirt, cobwebs, and mineral deposits that have built up on the house. You need a clean surface to promote good strong paint adhesion. This is the foundation of any good paint job. If you do not have a power washer, you can either rent one, or buy an inexpensive one. You do NOT need a lot of power. And do not try to remove the loose paint with this step. You will most likely just damage the wood if you have a really strong washer. I do not believe that it is important to use any detergents either. It is not like we are cleaning the dishes. We just want to remove dust and dirt. Detergents are better for removing grease, and if you have any of that on your house, you have other issues. But if you do, I suggest hitting those areas by hand with a mild detergent, then spraying it off with the washer
Once you have washed the house, you need to give it plenty of time to dry. This will depend on the area of the country you live. I use to live in Chicago, and we would have to give the house three or four days. Now I live in Denver, Colorado, and a house is usually dry in a couple of hours. This is kind of self explanatory, but, you can't paint on a wet surface. It just doesn't work.
Okay, we have a clean, dry, repaired house, and we are ready to paint. But wait, we need to do the next, really important step: surface preparation. This is where we scrape any failed areas of paint. This will take on many different looks. It could be bubbled. It could be cracked. It could be flaking. No matter what it is doing, you need to scrape the entire area, to remove the loose paint. Sometimes, you will find an area that will just keep coming off, the more you scrape, and sometimes in big sheets. It is best to remove as much of this as will come off. The reason is, you most likely have a loose bond between this layer of paint, and the surface.
Once the paint stops coming off, it is best to sand the edges. This will depend on your desired result. If you wish to have a finished product that is very smooth, with no indentations, you will need to sand quite a bit, depending on the number of layers originally there. To make this easier, an orbital sander will help out this process. If you are not so concerned with having it look brand new, then a feather sanding of the edges is good enough.
Ready for paint? Not yet. The next step is to caulk any gaps that have cracked out. Some homeowners want to caulk every gap the find. And if you have an issue with how something looks, then caulk can help. But there are a lot of areas that are not necessary. One area we commonly find no caulk, is under the eves, or the soffits. This area is fairly protected, and does not need to be caulked, but from an aesthetic point of view, it does look better. Some customers have requested for siding to be caulked. While this is not standard, on one house we painted, it made a huge difference in the end result. The siding had not been installed quite right, and there was a great deal of gapping. Caulking the gaps covered up those problems. If you are hiring a Chicago painting contractor to do this, know that it is not standard practice, and will be an additional charge.
Do you have any holes? Some houses will have small holes, caused by wood peckers, or items that were once installed on the house, that have been removed (satellite dishes, flag poles, etc), and these areas can be addressed with wood filler. But only if they are small. It is my opinion that anything over a half dollar size will fail with putty or wood filler, and the board should be replaced.
Do you have glazed windows? There are not too many houses with these any more. Thankfully they have stopped making glazed window. But you may have an older home that windows have not been replaced. My family has a cabin in Northern Wisconsin that has over 30 windows with 8 pains of glass each. All are glazed, and it is quite the project when they have been ignored for a while.
To re-glaze, you need to scrape out the bad glazing. Be very careful not to get too aggressive. The glass can be broken quite easily. Once you have fully scraped out a widow, take your glazing and a putty knife (I prefer a flexible blade about an inch and a half) and knife it on at a 45 degree angle or less. This will take some practice to get it to look right. After glazing, you will need to let it dry. This may take several days (again depending on your area of the country). You will also need to prime the raw glazing prior to painting.
Now you are ready to paint. Your house is clean, dry, primed, caulked, and maybe even glazed. You have the proper foundation to begin painting.
First thing you need to do is to inspect the house. What areas need to be repaired? Are there window sills that are rotten? Are there any bad corner boards? Do you need to replace any pieces of siding? If the answer is yes, then either go to the big orange store down the street, or call the handyman. There is no sense in painting over bad wood. Its just stupid. Paint is good for one thing: keeping out the elements. Not holding together your house.
If you don't have any bad areas, or you have accomplished step one, then it is time to clean. You need to power wash the surface to remove any dirt, cobwebs, and mineral deposits that have built up on the house. You need a clean surface to promote good strong paint adhesion. This is the foundation of any good paint job. If you do not have a power washer, you can either rent one, or buy an inexpensive one. You do NOT need a lot of power. And do not try to remove the loose paint with this step. You will most likely just damage the wood if you have a really strong washer. I do not believe that it is important to use any detergents either. It is not like we are cleaning the dishes. We just want to remove dust and dirt. Detergents are better for removing grease, and if you have any of that on your house, you have other issues. But if you do, I suggest hitting those areas by hand with a mild detergent, then spraying it off with the washer
Once you have washed the house, you need to give it plenty of time to dry. This will depend on the area of the country you live. I use to live in Chicago, and we would have to give the house three or four days. Now I live in Denver, Colorado, and a house is usually dry in a couple of hours. This is kind of self explanatory, but, you can't paint on a wet surface. It just doesn't work.
Okay, we have a clean, dry, repaired house, and we are ready to paint. But wait, we need to do the next, really important step: surface preparation. This is where we scrape any failed areas of paint. This will take on many different looks. It could be bubbled. It could be cracked. It could be flaking. No matter what it is doing, you need to scrape the entire area, to remove the loose paint. Sometimes, you will find an area that will just keep coming off, the more you scrape, and sometimes in big sheets. It is best to remove as much of this as will come off. The reason is, you most likely have a loose bond between this layer of paint, and the surface.
Once the paint stops coming off, it is best to sand the edges. This will depend on your desired result. If you wish to have a finished product that is very smooth, with no indentations, you will need to sand quite a bit, depending on the number of layers originally there. To make this easier, an orbital sander will help out this process. If you are not so concerned with having it look brand new, then a feather sanding of the edges is good enough.
Once the area has been scraped and sanded, you need to prime it with a high quality primer. From experience, the best primer to use is an exterior oil-based primer. There are some good latex primers on the market, but if you have some areas that receive a lot of moisture, an oil will outperform the latex. I remember Chicago painting contractor for a family back (my early days), and they had had their house painted almost every year. I came along and suggested we more to the oil based primer. I heard back from them years later that my paint job lasted far longer than anyone's prior to me. And I was just a know-it-all college kid at the time. When priming, if you are trying to get away with one coat of paint (usually in a matching situation), you can have the primer tinted close to the paint color, so you do not need to apply multiple coats for coverage.
Ready for paint? Not yet. The next step is to caulk any gaps that have cracked out. Some homeowners want to caulk every gap the find. And if you have an issue with how something looks, then caulk can help. But there are a lot of areas that are not necessary. One area we commonly find no caulk, is under the eves, or the soffits. This area is fairly protected, and does not need to be caulked, but from an aesthetic point of view, it does look better. Some customers have requested for siding to be caulked. While this is not standard, on one house we painted, it made a huge difference in the end result. The siding had not been installed quite right, and there was a great deal of gapping. Caulking the gaps covered up those problems. If you are hiring a Chicago painting contractor to do this, know that it is not standard practice, and will be an additional charge.
Do you have any holes? Some houses will have small holes, caused by wood peckers, or items that were once installed on the house, that have been removed (satellite dishes, flag poles, etc), and these areas can be addressed with wood filler. But only if they are small. It is my opinion that anything over a half dollar size will fail with putty or wood filler, and the board should be replaced.
Do you have glazed windows? There are not too many houses with these any more. Thankfully they have stopped making glazed window. But you may have an older home that windows have not been replaced. My family has a cabin in Northern Wisconsin that has over 30 windows with 8 pains of glass each. All are glazed, and it is quite the project when they have been ignored for a while.
To re-glaze, you need to scrape out the bad glazing. Be very careful not to get too aggressive. The glass can be broken quite easily. Once you have fully scraped out a widow, take your glazing and a putty knife (I prefer a flexible blade about an inch and a half) and knife it on at a 45 degree angle or less. This will take some practice to get it to look right. After glazing, you will need to let it dry. This may take several days (again depending on your area of the country). You will also need to prime the raw glazing prior to painting.
Now you are ready to paint. Your house is clean, dry, primed, caulked, and maybe even glazed. You have the proper foundation to begin painting.
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