Please call or email me. Please call or email me.

A 4th generation house painter & consultant,
specializing in
old-world painting techniques.

From Prep to Finish

SwooshPractical tips to help you paint like a pro.

People ask me all the time what's the most important thing you can do when you paint. I generally tell them it depends on what you're painting. But if I had to choose one tip that was most important, I'd say ... prep and prime!

Here are some of my prep and prime tips, along with others that might be useful...

Prep & Prime

Cleaning:

Always clean your woodwork and walls prior to sanding and painting with the “wonder product” ammonia. Use 1 cup of ammonia to 1 gallon of water to wipe down your woodwork and walls prior to prepping and painting.

Filling Small Holes:

When filling small holes like nail holes, fill them with a spackle, then take a damp rag and carefully remove the excess filler on the wall area around the filled hole, leaving only the filled hole. This keeps the patch from showing when it’s painted over.

Wet Areas:

When priming any wall or ceiling surfaces that might be in contact with water, be sure to use an oil base primer.

Glazing Windows:

When re-glazing exterior windows, after removing the old glazing, be sure to prime the window sash with an exterior oil base primer prior to re-glazing. This keeps the raw wood from drawing the oil out of the glazing compound and making it brittle.

Painting

Direction to Paint:

Always start from the top and work down. Paint ceilings first, and when painting walls, start at the top.

Cutting-In Ceilings:

When painting with a brush and roller, make sure you cut in your walls and ceilings before you roll them.

Woodwork

Painting Trim Woodwork:

When brushing trim woodwork with an oil base paint, add a little Penetrol paint conditioner to your paint. It will help your paint brush-on and lay-down better.

Restoring Woodwork:

You can rejuvenate old stained and varnished woodwork without stripping. First clean and sand with 150 grit sand paper. Then find a stain color that matches the old color, stain over it, and wipe off. After the stain dries, add about 4 Tbsp of the stain to 1 qt of interior polyurethane and mix. The color polyurethane will help everything blend together better.

Products to Use:

It’s always best to use oil-based products on old woodwork.

Staining New Wood:

When staining new wood like pine, fir, and hemlock, make your stain from the color you want out of an oil based paint. This will eliminate most of the blotchiness.

Stains

Making Stains

You can make any color stain with a quart of interior oil-base paint and thinning the paint one-to-one with mineral spirits. This can be done with water-based products as well, but oil-based products always works better.

Painting Over Stains

Water base finishes can be applied over oil base stains after they have dried for 24 hours.

Treating Decks

There are two basic ways to treat decks. Both work. The choice depends on the look you want.

Natural Look:

For a natural look, simply clean your deck each year with bleach, using a mixture of four to one, bleach to water. If you're concerned about plants, you might choose instead to use one of the many biodegradeable products that are now on the market.

If your deck is cedar it will silver in color and doesn’t take long to clean. It will last as long as you keep the moss and mold under control.

Treated Look:

For a stained and treated look use a “Sikkens” product

 

Texturizing Toolkit Texture Toolkit
Pictures of painted house

Thanks Tracy!

We took your advice and our house turned out even better than we had hoped. We absolutely LOVE it!