Four Steps for Interior House Painting in Kansas City

Liberty, MO: Interior house painting is one of the best and most affordable ways to brighten up your home or office.  Quality interior painting can transform a faded and uninspiring space into an inspiration for you, your guests, or your clients.

The secret to assuring a quality interior painting job (or any painting project) is proper preparation.  If adequate painting preparation is not done, there is a high chance that your finished project won’t turn out as flawless as it should.

Preparing your surfaces for interior house painting involves various steps. Therefore, it’s alway good to outline the whole process step by step and to create a work checklist.  Doing this enables you to anticipate what problems you might encounter at any point as well as having the necessary tools and supplies already purchased. This checklist can act as a form of reference during the project. You don’t need to have every detail planned out, but it does helps to know the direction you are heading and the steps you should follow.

If you intend painting the interior of your home or business as a DIY project, then keep these four (4) major steps in mind.  They can help you follow a professional process. Here is the process that we follow:

Four Steps for Interior House Painting

• Move furniture to the center of the room and then cover floors and furniture throughly
• Fill holes, patch cracks, and seal stains
• Prime or sand high gloss surfaces, area where repairs were made, and then apply high-quality paint
• Touch-up walls & trim to create a perfect finish

Cover All Floors and Furniture                                                                                                     

Firstly, it only makes sense that you cover the furniture and floor in the room you’re working on. Skipping this step can spell damage for your furniture and even the floors. Imagine discovering some drops of paint on your sofa or carpet later on after they have dried and set in.   We’re sure that’s not something you would want. We recommend taking the time to place all furniture at the center of the room, and cover.  Also, consider removing them from the room entirely.  This is a important step unless you’re planning on working in an empty room. You can cover the furniture with common materials. E.g. painter’s plastic. Use plastic film, drop cloths, or tarps to cover the floor or carpeting.

Sometimes, paint might drip past your defenses and land on a piece of your furniture or even the carpet or floor. When this happens, you should immediately clean it up while it’s still wet. See below for how to do this. 

Even when you are painting a ceiling, we still advise that you cover the entire floor and your furniture. We use drop cloths and canvas to protect the floor from paint. Doing this not only protects your floor, but also provide a platform to lay out all your work tools, supplies, and paint buckets in case of a spill or a dropped brush or roller.   Completing this first step, you’ll be able to work faster and make fewer mistakes along the way.

Fill Holes & Cracks, and Seal Stains

Preparing the surface determines how good your final painting project will look. It involves scraping any loose, cracked, or bubbling paint.  Patch small holes, cracks and dents with a lightweight joint compound and use tape if necessary. Don’t try to fill them all at once, work in thin layers until the joint compound is slightly above the surface of the wall.  Wait for the joint compound to dry, then sand the surface imperfections smooth with the surface of the wall. A sanding sponge is perfect for this.  Make sure to caulk around windows and trim if they need it.

Pro Tip – Use a joint compound that dries fast in order to add thin layers in a timely fashion as you work from one patch to another.  This will save time. 

Prime Repairs] The primer covers patches and taped joints to give the final coat better coverage and aesthetics.

Always use a primer when you’re painting over unpainted drywall, sheet rock repairs, patches, freshly dried joint compound, and/or dark colored paint.  It is also recommended to sand and/or prime any time you paint over a gloss or semi-gloss surface.

Priming serves three significant purposes. Firstly, it helps to ensure that stains don’t bleed through. Secondly, it helps to ensure that you only need to use one coat of paint for the final coating (as long as you select a high quality paint).  Lastly, it greatly improves the adhesion of the paint to the surface, which then, reduces future blistering. Keep in mind that professionals typically tint the primer towards the finished color.

High-Quality Paints

Selecting a quality paint can sometimes be a challenge. Typically, the cheaper paints are not the best for coverage or durability. A high-quality paint contains more solids (pigment).  Pigments are made of very small ground particles. Pigments give a paint the ability to hide the paint or surface it’s applied over.  It covers stains and previously painted surfaces better due to these solids.  You can typically find the percentage of solids on the technical data sheet that is available where you buy the paint or online.

A better-quality paint will typically contain less solvents.  Solvents are what carries the pigments in a liquid form. In latex paint, the solvent is mainly water and in oil-based paint, solvents are mainly mineral spirits.  Solvents can make the paint look and feel thick, but the solvents will evaporate and leave a thinner film of solids and resins.

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