4 Tips for Painting a Room
Spring is a great time to shrug off the winter doldrums and repaint a room with the latest on-trend colors. But beautifully painted rooms don’t just happen – you need to plan, prepare, and buy quality products if you want great results.
Here are four great tips from Westlake Ace Hardware to help make sure your next painting project creates the beautiful results you desire.
1) Color Your Mood
There are so many great paint colors to pick from this spring. All were created to help DIYers design a highly personalized home environment that helps you unwind, find balance, feel glamorous, or simply reconnect with those you love.
Pale Natural Olive from Valspar is an optimistic green that has a heart of linen, which weaves us all closer together. Benjamin Moore’s Metropolitan exudes glamour, beauty, and balance. Gatherings from Magnolia Home by Joanna Gaines captures the feeling of family and friendship, and makes you want to settle in around the table to share a good story.
2) Repair and Clean
Repair any holes using wall repair patch and a high quality spackling compound. A metal spackling knife will help you spread the compound more easily. Once dry, you can sand it with fine sandpaper. Smaller holes in trim can be repaired with wood filler.
Clean the wall thoroughly and remove stains and pet odors. Cleaning solutions like TSP and Simple Green are ideal for this.
3) Tape and Protect
Quality painter’s tape makes a huge difference in any painting project. It properly masks the surfaces you don’t want painted (such as crown molding and baseboards), protects against splatters and drips, produces sharp paint lines, and gives you professional-looking results.
4) Brush and Roll
As the saying goes, “With quality, you only cry once!” Though the best nylon polyester paint brushes and rollers may cost a little more, they won’t shed bristles and help the paint cover more completely. And when cleaned and properly cared for, the brushes will last for many years – and many painting projects – to come!
Most projects will at least require an angled 2- or 2 1/2-inch trim brush and a roller. Before “cutting in” around corners with the brush, dip it into the paint up to one-third of the length of the bristles. This will keep it from being overloaded with paint and will guard against dripping. Go slowly and use a series of overlapping strokes.
For painting large areas with a roller, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Work in small sections of two or three square feet, and load the roller with just enough paint to where it’s saturated – but not dripping. Hold the roller in your dominant hand, and follow a “W” or “M” pattern across and down using moderate pressure.
