Spring is practically around the corner and this article is all about giving the exterior of your house the paint job it deserves. As a professional house painter I might want to lay out five important tips that the vast majority get wrong when painting the exterior of their home.
House Wash – I like to give the house a good wash before I paint it. I do not wash all four sides at once however. I usually do only one side at a time because I’m going to be there for a week or two anyways probably. That way when you get to the next side there is not a lot of webs or sand or soil worked back up.
Choosing Colors – Some houses you drive by have weird tones. This is because they picked colors from a fan deck. For best results you should use an exterior house shading brochure. Its coordinated shading schemes help you to choose normal standardized tones. A standardized shading chart will have perfect shading matches that you should pick and choose from. Especially if doing a few shading schemes, you want a professional shading coordinated exterior brochure. These brochures are usually found at any paint store.
Use Quality Paint – I always use name brand paint on all my Exterior house painting. Why use inferior paint and waste all that hard labor? Especially in the event you are paying someone else to do the painting. I like Benjamin Moore exterior house paint. They have good time-tested exterior paints and primers.
Latex versus Oil Base – We always use latex paint on the outside or exterior of a house. Oil base or Alkyd coating tend to crack and peel. Latex paint can breathe and stays flexible. It lets the moisture out of the house. Oil base paints cannot. That is why you get cracking and peeling.
The only exception is when the you have bare wood. You want to prime it with an exterior alkyd or oil-base primer. Bare wood can cause bleed through stains that you can not hinder as well using a latex primer. However, the main thing is that you want to use latex paint on your house’s exterior and you want to use a good name brand exterior paint. Especially in case you are a house painter and you are doing it for a homeowner. Do not show up on their door step with average name brand paint. People want the best.