360renos: Prime Before Painting For Better, Longer-Lasting Results.

How to make your home stand out when selling

We can help your house sell quickly and at a good price -- even in a slow market.

It takes a lot more than sparkling windows, scented candles and chocolate-chip cookies to sell a home in today's market.

Improvements should be made so that the property shows well, is consistent with the neighborhood and does not involve capital investments.

Beyond any doubt, the best investment you can make is new paint. Painting can make a room or an exterior façade look brand-new, and totally transform the look and feel of a room or the entire residence. It is always wise to be somewhat restrained when choosing colors for a home-staging paint project. Avoid choosing colors that are too individual or flashy and favor neutral colors and schemes. This does not mean painting everything white, however.

Use subtle color schemes to accentuate the home's strengths and minimize weaknesses. Dark colors, for example, tend to make a room feel smaller, while lighter colors and pastels can make a room feel bigger.

There is another benefit to painting as well: the process of preparing the interior or exterior surfaces of a home for painting automatically allows us to go over the entire area receiving paint in great detail, and this can often expose items or areas requiring repair. It seems you always discover where the caulking has let go, where the wall is dinged.

It is always preferable that we discover and deal with these items before the real estate agent (or worse, the prospective buyer) points them out to you!

Dave - 360renos

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Friday, March 7, 2008

Prime Before Painting For Better, Longer-Lasting Results.

Priming before you paint can make a world of difference on the outcome of your paint job. Please remember to read all label directions as not all projects recommend the use of a primer. These may include surfaces such as painting a floor or staining a deck.

What can be so important about priming a surface? Primers serve two major functions: they seal porous materials so the topcoat won't dry with an uneven appearance and they aid the topcoat in bonding properly with the surface underneath.

The two main types of primers are primer-sealers and undercoaters. Unpainted surfaces, or surfaces where most of the original paint has been removed call for a primer sealer. Undercoaters should be used to form a bond between coats of paint.

Know your surface and choose the primer accordingly. For standard drywall surfaces, latex primers are better because they don't raise the nap or fibers on the surface of the wall board. For plaster surfaces, a latex or alkyd primer can be used. Alkyd undercoats are appropriate for wood trim.

For best results when painting over wallpaper, use an alkyd primer or alkyd primer/undercoater to seal potential bleedthrough and seals.

Once you have selected and applied the appropriate primer, you are ready to paint a topcoat. And because you took the time to prime, your finished paint job will be more attractive now and in the future.

Dave - 360renos

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Which Paint Is It - Latex or Oil?

Determining, definitively, whether a given paint was oil or latex has always been a bit of a problem, but an important one as you can paint oil over latex, but not latex over oil unless you use a special 'super adherent primer' first.

I used to recommend taking a bit of paint thinner on a clean contrasting colour cloth and wiping hard. If any colour comes off, it is oil based paint. If nothing happens, it is latex. But that didn't always work. Sometimes if the paint was very old, nothing at all came off.

Now a product has come out that reverses those rules. These swabs have acetone in them and they have no affect on oil based paints, but do take off latex. If the surface is stripped, it is Latex paint. If it just cleans or polishes the surface, it is Oil/Alkyd paint. Instead of the special swabs you could just use acetone and a contrasting coloured rag, if the paint colour shows up on the rag, it is latex. Acetone will do nothing to oil based paints. Old fingernail polish removers were made with acetone, and many still are -- look for a bottle that does not say 'without acetone'. You should test it first on a surface that you know is latex paint to be sure you have acetone in your liquid.

By the way, if you really want to paint latex over oil -- you can do it if you sand off the gloss and apply a "super adherent latex primer" first. Then you can continue with ordinary latex paint!

Dave - www.360renos.ca