Painting a home can be a wonderful way to personalize it, add atmosphere, and completely refresh it. In fact, painting a room is one of the most affordable home renovations that anyone can do! It is also one area where many homeowners feel that they can do a good job themselves rather than hiring a professional painter. It makes sense to save a little money in this economic environment but how can you prepare a home for the painting process?

Tips for Preparing to Paint

Even before picking up a brush, it’s really important to identify what rooms are going to be painted. Will you be painting the entire inside of the home or just a few rooms? Painting an entire home may seem like a daunting task but if it is split up room by room, the job is easier. Once you have identified what rooms you are going to paint, here are some tips on how to prepare each room:

• Furniture: Paint can get messy very quickly and no one wants to deal with paint splotches all over his or her tables, chairs, and other furniture. This is especially the case if you don’t have a lot of painting experience. So the first thing to do is to remove all of the furniture in the room to be painted. Do this one room at a time and the room next to it can serve as a place to move the furniture temporarily.
• Protection: Given how messy a painting job can be, it’s really important to protect floors, skirting boards, and other exposed areas that are not going to be painted. Use some good-quality drop sheets or plastic sheeting for this purpose. When it comes to protecting skirting boards, running masking tape along the top of them will suffice. Masking tape is also useful to protect window frames and other areas not to be painted.
• Cleaning: This step is really important. Lots of people forget to clean their walls first and simply slap on the paint. The problem is that grease, oils, finger marks, crayon marks, and other things build up on the walls over time. If these areas are painted over, the paint layer can be affected and even bubble, peel, or flake. The other common issue is that dark stains on the wall can sometimes show through even a few coats of paint, especially if it is of a lighter color. This definitely makes for a less-than-stellar finish!
• Paintings: Would you believe that some people leave paintings and photos on the wall, preferring to paint around them? Never do this!

Take it One Step at a Time

Painting a home can be a great way to make everything look almost new again but it can also seem to be a big job for an amateur painter. The important thing to remember is to prepare each room well, paint only one room at a time, and don’t rush the job.