Painting the house...Follow

Invest in one of those spray gizmos. You will be done with the whole place in two days of moderate work. You will probably spend more time taping and laying plastic down than you will actually painting.

Hiring a professional might be the better bet, though. The will be in and out in a day, and you won't have to worry about it coming out poorly.

Edited, Dec 5th 2011 5:47am by Lubriderm

Winter is setting in up here... fly me down and I'll paint your whole house for free!

I painted an apartment before, and then had to paint it back when it came time to move out. I remember hating every minute of it, which is why I'd rather pay for someone else to do it out of my own pocket.

When I was 10 or so, I demanded my parents buy me a few gallons of paint and painted my own bedroom a lovely dove gray. I don't remember hating that quite so much, probably because it was a small bedroom and I was so damn pleased with the results. (Around that time my oldest sister commented that my destiny was to be an interior designer, and due to bad blood between me and that sister I steadfastedly marked that off the list of things I wanted to be when I grew up.)

Still, the difference between a child's bedroom and a 1500 square foot house is about 1400 square feet.

Both times I painted, I managed to avoid making a really bad mess on the carpet. But it's just so much work, that the $1500 or whatever it's going to cost us (probably more than that due to the bloody ten foot high ceilings) seems like it'll be worth it.

We opted also to raid the backsplash fund (which itself got raided to buy the new microwave a few months ago) for the painting task, since we can just have the wall of the kitchen painted in a heavy duty water resistant paint and not have to install the tile after all.

We wanted to do the entire area behind the cabinets, which was quoted at $800 for (yes) glass tile. Even using a cheaper tile brings it to $600, due to the sheer area.

The paint will be the first step. Right now it's flat paint, and you can see every water splash behind the sink.

I have painted and re-painted rooms in my house more times than I care to remember. When we bought this house we had 2 rooms with wainscoting, ended up painting the rooms as I didn't want to rip out the walls and re-sheetrock the rooms. 1 room has this odd textured panels that the previous owners had somehow wall papered. Painting that room was a pain, needed to use a sponge effect so the texture wasn't noticeable. Bedrooms repainted at least 4x each in last 8 years. Make sure you use a good primer and tape off everything you can. Like lubriderm said you will spend more time prepping than you will painting.

Getting a sprayer will make things VERY easy but it is even more important to tape stuff off. Hiring a professional will make it easier for you but if your walls don't have a lot of damage you are better off doing on your own, cheaper too. It really isn't hard to do it, it is only bad when you have a wife like mine that wants to change the color scheme in the house every time she watches a new episode of 90210 or the Kardashians. Have fun with the paint, I am going to be painting my daughters playroom with chalkboard paint on one wall.. I think it will be about the only time I will WANT to paint a room.

The hell it ins't. Try not getting ripped off/the wrong kind next time. I used an eggshell paint on my last kitchen. Quick wipe and everything came off of it.


Edited, Dec 5th 2011 7:12am by Uglysasquatch

I'm rather surprised at the ratio of painters to non-painters in here. Everyone I know has painted a room or a house/apartment at some point. Painting is probably the one project I would say anyone could do.

Rollers and brushes. Dollar store rollers are just as good as $8.00 "Professional" rollers, get lots of them. Get decent brushes, and a few cheapy foam brushes (they're good for smoothing brush marks in tricky places).

Don't even bother with edgers if you're picky about appearance, they work great until the paint gets into them, which is about half a wall worth of edging. Find some boxes and rip off the tops to use for edge blockers it'll allow you to move a little quicker but you still need to tape all of your trim/doorknobs etc with painters tape and remove the covers from all of your switches and outlets. Don't use brushes around outlets, take the covers off and use a roller. Oh, and expect to do 3 coats, sometimes you can get away with 2 but you won't know until it's dry, darker the colour, the more coats you'll need.

It's difficult to ***** up paint really since you can wipe drips and smudges off any dry surface with a damp cloth up to 10 minutes after it's been applied. Only thing to watch for is if you're painting ceilings do them first and cover the floor, ceiling paint tends to speckle the room and you don't really notice it until it's dry and you have white specks all over every surface in the room.

It is a lot of work though and it's hard on your arms (you're basically holding them up the entire time as opposed to other jobs where you would be shifting positions). I could probably do that in 2 days of solid work but I'd be very sore. Do not use a spray gun if you don't know what you're doing, you'll just make a mess of your house. A pro will charge you a good bit but it will look much smoother than anything you could do yourself (due to the spray gun pros typically use). In my area you'd be looking probably $1400-2k for a pro to do it but it can vary quite a bit.

It's all about tape. Spend some extra time there and the painting is easy.

We're trying to get rid of the flat paint Every little stain on the walls is permanent.

Who the hell sands paint? I'd sooner rip the drywall off and redo it than sand paint.

Go with Satin if you're concerned about wipe-ability. Semi-gloss is like car paint when it dries (very shiny), you probably don't want that on your walls. Keep in mind the shinier the paint the more obvious any imperfections in your walls become.

If you're doing it yourself, make sure to paint as even a coat as possible. Lots of people make the mistake of rolling until there's barely any paint on the roller before loading up again. It's not like flat paint where if you later see spots where the coat is thin you can just touch it up. Also, you're better off doing each wall individually, rather than cutting in the whole room before rolling.

Aghhhhhh painting is so awful. I will take ugly, metallic velvet-adorned wallpaper from the 70s before I paint a wall.

Why people are okay with this masochism is beyond me