Painting inside your house requires a significant amount of preparation. You need to prepare your house, the painting surface, as well as the paint. It’s important that you get everything in place before you start trying to paint the interior of your house. Chefs call this practice “mise-en-place”. It is the process of getting everything in place before you get started. The process of preparing begins with preparing the space.
Preparing the Space
Preparing the space means that you remove all of the furniture in the room so that none of it gets paint on it. You need to also lay down drop cloths and/or plastic to protect your floors and appliances from the paint. Make sure you take everything down with painter’s tape so it doesn’t move while you’re painting. If you don’t intend to paint the window frames, light fixtures, and so on, make sure you cover them with painter’s tape as well. Once you have the cloths on the ground and everything covered in painter’s tape, your space is ready for painting.
Preparing the Walls
You need to make sure you prepare the walls in the best way possible. If you have wallpaper on the walls, you should scrape it off with a putty knife or a wallpaper knife. If it’s paint, you should consider whether you can paint over it, or if you just need to remove it. In many cases, you don’t need to actually remove the old paint. You just need to make sure you are applying the same kind of paint. If you have an oil-based paint on the walls, make sure you are applying an oil-based paint on top of it. It can be helpful to sand the wall somewhat to make sure you roughen the smooth surface slightly.
If you are painting over a light color with a darker color, you probably don’t even need primer. However, if you are painting over designs or over a darker color, primer can help. A layer of primer will cover the old paint very well and give the new paint something to hold on to. Once all of that is done, you can begin painting.
The Paint
You should make sure your paint choices are conducive to the task. You need to buy all of your paint at once and from the same place. The paint in most places is mixed based on a computer algorithm; therefore, if the algorithm is slightly off, it will produce different shades of paint. If you buy paint from two different locations or even the same location on two different days, you could get slightly different shades of paint. To avoid that problem, you need to buy all of your paint at the same time.
Buy more than you think you’ll need. That way, you won’t have to try to stretch paint or go back to the store for more paint. You’ll also have the exact right shade of paint if you need to touch up after damage.
