How to Prep for Painting

If you’re planning to paint the interior of your home and haven’t got any painting experience, you’ll want to know how to prep your walls before you get started with adding the colour to your room.  The first step is to remove all shelving and pictures from the walls.  Next, move all the smaller items out of the room and move all bigger items into the center of the room if they cannot be moved out.  Cover all the remaining furniture with a drop cloth.

Now, you’re ready to get started with prepping the walls.  First, wash them down because you’ll then be able to see any flaws that need to be repaired.  I like using my Swiffer Sweeper with the wet cloths for this because the long handle makes it easy to reach the ceiling and tops of the walls to clean away any dirt and cobwebs.

Next, fill in any nail holes or dings with Poly Filla or other spackling paste.  Check the tops of the baseboards to see if they are pulling away from the walls.  If so, apply some latex caulking to fill in the gaps.  If you have any larger holes in your walls, then you will need a drywall patch which you can pick up at any paint retail store.  To repair the hole, simply place the patch over the hole and then spread the spackling paste over the patch with a putty knife.  Allow the spackling paste to dry for about one hour (perhaps more for the larger repairs) and then you can sand everything down.  In fact, at this point you can sand the walls completely to ensure a smooth finish.

Once any necessary repairs are completed, you will need to prime the walls to at least cover the places where you’ve made the repairs.  If you are planning on using a good quality paint from a paint retailer such as Benjamin Moore of Sherwin Williams, you may be able to get away with only spot priming the places where you’ve applied the spackling compound and caulking.  The reason is that many of the higher quality finishing paints contain a primer anyway.  If you’re using a lower quality paint, then you’ll need to prime everything beforehand.  Then, allow the primer to dry for about one hour before applying your paint.

One final tip, if you’re not planning on painting the baseboards, you should apply painter’s tape to the top of the baseboards so that any splatter from rolling the walls does not get on them.  Using painter’s tape rather than masking tape is highly recommended because it’s low tack and shouldn’t peel the finish off the baseboards.