One of the best ways to make your home stand out is through an appealing exterior paint job. Here are some steps to help you go about the painting process.
Prep Surfaces
While you may want to get started on painting right away, you need to prepare the painting surface to get the best results.
For instance, if you plan on applying stucco to a home exterior, let the stucco cure for 28 days or longer, as paint won’t adhere to uncured stucco, resulting in a dusty or chalky appearance.
When repainting a home, you need to inspect exterior walls and look for and remove any peeling, chipping, mildew, or other flaws. You can easily kill mildew by using a garden sprayer to apply a chlorine bleach solution on the exterior surface. You can also pressure-clean the exterior to remove dust and dirt particles, along with loose old paint.
Patching and Caulking
Another step to take before painting is to caulk and patch. Caulking effectively seals cracks and joints where different exterior materials meet, including door frames, molding, window frames, and fascia boards.
Make sure you replace any fascia boards or wood siding that appears to be rotting, sand wood trim and doors, and patch old chipping or pitting stucco with new stucco.
Be Patient and Prime
If you want to get the best results from your painting project, you also need to prime using a quality sealer. Sealer has high resin content that creates a great surface for the paint, helping it stick.
Latex primer is ideal for vinyl and wood siding on newer construction, and stucco primer is also an option for stucco surfaces. You can check the label on any primer or sealer to determine how long you need to wait prior to painting.
Choose High-Quality Paint
A great exterior paint to use is 100 percent acrylic latex, which consists of pigments for color, binders to hold the pigment in place, and solvents that make the paint easy to spread. Most of these paints are water-based.
As the paint dries, the solvent evaporates to leave behind the color and binders alone. High-quality paints generally leave a better appearance once dried, and will last longer than poor-quality paints. The pigment and binder are called “volume solids.” You can determine the percentage of volume solids in your paint by checking the manufacturer’s website or asking a local distributor for information in a Technical Data Sheet. If you find a paint labeled “premium” or “super-premium,” this generally means you’ll get a paint with a higher percentage of volume solids.
Work with Professional Installers
One of the best ways to make sure that a painting project is done right is to work with commercial painters. They can even recommend a product to use and efficiently complete a project within a strict schedule, but make sure you know how much the project will cost before they get started.
Taking these steps will allow exterior painting jobs to go more smoothly.