How to Properly Prepare Your Home to Be Painted

If you are taking on the rather large task of painting the exterior of your home, one of the absolute most important steps that you cannot overlook is properly preparing the surface of it. If you do not, you can be guaranteed that you will find yourself painting again a lot sooner than anticipated or hoped for, and you may find that the end result of your paint job is not at all what you had hoped it would be. The following steps will guide you through the process:

One: The first thing you need to do is pressure wash your home. You can do this yourself with a cleaner you own, or if you need a more heavy-duty one, one that is rented, or you can hire a professional to do it. Just remember to cover surfaces around where you will be cleaning, such as vehicles, plants and grass, with a tarp prior to beginning because the flying paint can prove quite messy. Also be sure not to get the cleaner too close to the home. These devices have a lot of power and can very easily damage the surface of your home.

Two: Any paint that did not come off during the pressure cleaning process needs to come off. You can use a scraper to loosen hard to remove areas. This is time consuming and tedious work, but to ensure proper adherence of the new paint, it is not a step to skip or shirk on doing correctly.

Three: Once you have removed all of the paint that you possibly can by hand it is time to sand. Make sure that you have the proper sandpaper for the surface you are sanding. If you are unsure, ask a professional when you are purchasing your paint. Wrap sandpaper around small pieces of wood to get to hard to reach places. Again, this is a tedious process but one that cannot be skipped if you want the final painted product to be the best it can be in both appearance and in endurance.

Four: Now is the time to inspect your home thoroughly for any cracks, ridges, dings or other areas of damage that exist on the exterior of the home. Fixing these items now is beneficial to you in many ways, including that the corrected items will help ensure your paint is not compromised at a later date. You also want to fill in gaps around windows and doors with caulking if it needs it, since you are already in the vicinity and are caring for the home exterior.

Five: Rough up glossy areas that are going to be painted so that your primer and paint will better adhere to them. This is a simple process that merely entail taking sandpaper to them and roughly going over the surface.

In following these five steps, you are ensuring that you have provided conditions conducive to an excellent exterior painting job and you can proceed to the next steps of carefully priming and painting the home.