Painting Walls LIke a Professional Painter: Start to Finish

all right today we're down here going to be painting some interior walls and I'm going to give you kind of the steps and the process I go about painting interior walls we're going to do uh the prep work I'm going to be doing some masking uh rolling of the walls but before we do the rolling we definitely want to look for imperfections scrape imperfections and uh infill any type of holes now we're doing these walls down here uh there's Nails in the walls I'm always looking for nails any type of hangers and stuff and you want to make sure our you're going to be rehanging the stuff in the same location if the customer is going to be rehanging the pictures we never uh remove the nails we just paint right over them you don't want to remove them patch them then the customer has no idea where those you know Nails hooks Etc were so these ones we're just going to be painting right over the top of them there is no other holes or nothing that needs to be filled in this wall now we are going to be doing some scraping on these walls one of the things you uh do want to do is have good lighting and scrape any texture imperfections are what we would call boogers on the wall and that's just drips of paint it could be um big hard chunks of um texture that somebody painted over previously I just take and have a 5 in one tool I use the scraping part of it to do any type of scraping we are going to be painting in here you definitely want to have drop floss cover the room this type of Runner right here I use a cover grip these are nonslip drop cloths right here excellent drop cloths they don't slip on hardwood floors vinyl floors so if I'm just doing walls I'm typically just using a runner around the room so had some kind of rough texture in this corner I just want to scrape top down that's all scraped ready to go sometimes if we got you know texture that's really bad we'll just break out our easan 5 in sander and then just quickly sand the walls so now when it comes to Rolling the walls I always remove the switch plate and now you'll see you know some painters just cut in around the switch plates if you cut in around the switch plates it it leaves a line you can see right here somebody either cut in around this switch plate previously and it left a little line or they put the switch plate back on when the paint was wet so the customer goes and like changes the s switch plates and puts smaller one on smaller ones on and you cut around it now you're going to have the old color exposed I always remove the switch plates then we always either mask them off or cover them I use socket blockers you're going to be a lot faster painting your walls if you have protection on there and you're not having to slow down and work around you know the outlet or the socket you just peel the backing off they just stick right on they're reusable you can use them I've used them at least five to seven times over and over you can see they've got paint all over them now I'm going to begin masking I'm going to be masking my base fors off I don't want any paint on my baseboards any um drips splatters Etc I'll be using two different tapes I'm going to be using inch and a half to go on the top of the baseboards and then I'm going to be using paper and blue tape that's going to be packed onto the baseboards that will come out and cover the Gap from the carpet to the the drop cloth Runner any painting with you do it yourself for a professional painter 3M hand masker is an absolute you must tool one of the things I'm going to be doing before I you know mask my baseboards the tops you takeing a duster brush dust off the tops any dust on the top of the baseboards to to make it so your masking doesn't stick now I'm just going to attach paper to my baseboards and all I'm doing is just tacking it to the face a few places it's going to make it so no drips we get on the carpet where the drop cloth isn't covering it now I do want to do the tops of the baseboards so I get a nice crisp line there so maybe use an inch and half tape on the top of my baseboards and I'm going to be using frog tape orange when I'm doing that versus the blue so frog tape blue has the polymer on the outside of the tape so you don't get any paint or liquid bleeding underneath the tape frog tape orange does not have that polymer on the outside it's what I use is my everyday production tape it's tackier it's it sticks really good it has a um 3-day release the Frog tape blue has a lot longer Rel release time it has a 14-day clean release I have a very very narrow top of uh the lip on this baseboard right here and it's really hard for tape to stick to that little top lip right there so you want something that's very tacky the Orange is a lot tackier than the blue so it's going to stick a lot better and another thing is the walls the these walls I'm painting them is white so it's going to be very close to the trim so anything actually ble bled underneath the tape you're not going to see it cuz it's white on white now if I was doing a black wall on to white trim it's very critical that you would use a tape like frog tape blue or frog tape green that has the polymer on the outside of the tape so it doesn't bleed underneath the um tape you could hand cut it in but we definitely like you know masking to get perfectly straight line I'm going to expose make sure the the old color stays showing if I get my masking onto the old color then I paint my wall and then pull my tape you're going to see the old color once all my masking is is done I can begin painting my walls another thing is I like using inch and half tape when I mask onto my baseboards cuz you have more tape hanging out over the top of the baseboard so if you get any Splatter from your paint the face of your baseboard everything is protected versus using 1 in tap tape so I use inch and a half tape when I'm masking on the top of the baseboards so I'm going to get my roller loaded up and one of the mistakes I see a lot of do-it-yourselfers you'll do is they get their roller loaded up they start rolling with it and they try to stretch their paint out too far without loading up the roller you want to just load up your roller constantly keep applying a lot of paint to the wall one of the things that you want to do also is have an extension pole I always use either a two to four extension pole or a 4 to 8T extension pole you're going to be a lot faster more efficient using an extension pull so we always say you want to work smarter not harder so I'm going to just start from right to left work my way down this wall rolling the roller is not 100% loaded up yet it's going to take just a little bit so I'm just going to keep loading this thing up till it gets totally 100% loaded now I'm going to be doing two coats to Al most colors I it's really rare that you'll ever paint and only have to paint one coat I'm not going to be doing my cut ends until my first coat dries I'll do my first coat do my cut ends and then do my second coat so just a little you know Pro tip definitely you can see I'm definitely going to be doing two coats so I don't want to make my first coat too heavy cuz I want it to dry really fast I just noticed that rollers loud noise you just noticed the whole time so got little Pro tip so I was just rolling my walls and I was getting really annoyed my rollers was squeaking really bad it's a really nice um blue tiger roller T9 bow Shield I ride bikes keep my chain lubricated couple drops in there and voila it's not squeaking anymore so to give you kind of just uh some tips on how I go about rolling walls there's you know multiple different ways you can roll walls now I typically load my roller I put it right in the middle of the wall and then I begin to distribute the paint from top to bottom then I just overlap 50% move on out a little bit even it out then I lay it that lay it out from top to bottom I usually just work one section at a time one roller width at a time I'll load it back up do the same thing I'm going to set it right in the middle overlap 50% begin to distribute it once it's distributed evenly I will lay it out and your layout is extremely critical when you're using vibrant colors dark colors Etc now there's a lot of other methods there's people that you know will use a method they'll kind of make a w with it uh and then begin Distributing it out from there but you know you just got to pick what works for you method I've been using and I've just teach my employees is this method just putting it in the middle get to distribute it you want that paint distributed evenly you know from top to bottom you don't want it heavy in the middle or heavy at the top so however you decide to do it you however you just decide to get the paint on the wall get it on distribute it out evenly and then lay it out now this is something like you'll see me taking twirl my roller when I'm taking it to and from my location so this is a really good tip to keep you from dripping paint anywhere you don't want paint to be dripped so I can take fully load this thing up if I just take and carry it from here to where I'm actually rolling you could actually drip paint but if I'm actually twirling this thing just subconsciously twirling it it's never going going to drip as long as I'm moving this thing I'm not going to drip I'm actually over brand new carpet pretty convinced and confident that it's not going to drift so when I load my roller up what I typically do you'll see me kind of just rotate it in my hands to until I get it to the location that I want it to be and that will keep you from having any drips coming off your roller if I lower this thing up and now I pull it from here you can see paint starting to drip so if I pull it from here to my wall I'm going to actually get drips now I can take load this thing up and then begin twirling it before it exits My Pan so you can see got my socket blockers on here I don't have to be so careful don't have to worry about you know hitting my socket I can hit the block the socket blocker get paint all around there get painted really well my holet is protected working on my did my first coat got a nice thin coat on it's getting pretty close to being dry you're only it's only been like 30 minutes dry enough where I can do my cut ends now um using a white and whites just whites never cover really well at all just in general um so I'm proba going to have to touch up my cut ends too but I can do my cut ends and then I'll begin rolling my second coat so I'm using a premier this is a brook so uh Dupont filaments combination tinex Oreo handmade Brush by premere brush paint brush en roller out of New York this is the best brush you can use for interior painting and doing cuttings now I'm working I did my ceiling cut ends I typically do my ceiling cuttings first and then I'll go around do around doors windows what you don't want to happen especially if you're using vibrant colors dark colors you don't want your cut ends to uh dry before you go roll your walls so you typically I'd be working like one wall at a time if I'm by myself or at Max two walls at a time if you're working as a team you can do you know all four walls you can work a lot faster your cuttings won't be too dry before you get to them cuz you want to pull your tape while your cins are wet so I'm just going to work this short wall and this large wall I don't do two coats on my cuttings I do touch-ups on my cins after after I'm done my first coat was thin so it dries fast my second coat I'm going to load it up super heavy every every stripe I do I don't want to roll um roll over it like over and over I just want to get that paint on nice and heavy and then don't go back over because our paint underneath is still not cured so you don't want that to rewet and start pulling and stippling looks like it's probably going to cover whites are pretty notorious for having to do sometimes even up to four coats even white over white usually are going to have to be two coats I'm going to get this short wall here done and then I'm going to be pulling my tape so pulling your tape if you don't pull your tape while the paint's wet what's going to happen is you'll get bridging from the tape to the wall and it'll peel the paint right off the wall you don't want that to happen so you have to pull your masking while it's wet I go back and do my ceiling touchups so you can see there's there's ver our horizontal lines I'm just going to go back hit my horizontal lines vertically so we going to recut in everything but just go over those light spots all right so now I've got two coats put on the walls the the paint dries about an hour off hour later we're waiting for it to dry to see if we needed to put a third coat on and even um touch up our cut ends again now the paint is covered you know extremely well when it was drying it looked like it was going to uh take a third coat now white paints like this a white over a dark color a lot of whites out there literally could take you four coats to cover even you know two to three coats a white on a white this paint that I was using here covered extremely well two coats cut ends are covered well the touch-ups on the cut ends covered now the wall is all done dry we can start it cleaning up last thing I do you know as your painting we're always trying to look for imperfections in the walls cuz I'm always trying to correct those imperfections you saw what we did we pulled some Nails uh made a couple little patches down here then we rolled our first coat whenever you start you're dealing with whites things are going to start to show up that you never saw in the walls before especially as the lighting changes you'll start to see some we had a a couple little holes that showed up that we patched a couple of things I noticed I noticed a little um another little kind of peak right there another what we'd call Booger that showed up and another kind of a big piece of texture showed up right here those are simple easy touch-ups to do you know with this color if you're uh I can scrape it touch it up with the paint and then that's just another thing that kind of just stands out to me I'm always trying to look and make those type of Corrections if this was your final coat and you were in you'll say a vibrant red or a yellow or a green or something dark if that was in the middle of the wall and you Tred to touch it up it would show up so you know you want to make sure if you're doing something vyl like that that it's not going to show up on a wall like this down low uh this color I can scrape that I can do that little small touchup and you're never going to see it but just stuff like that you bugs me I like to make those Corrections [Music]