360renos: Winter Painting Tips

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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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Winter Painting Tips

The most common difficulties encountered during the winter while apply quality acrylic latex paint is an uneven look due to roller marks, curtaining and picture framing (when cutting and rolling looks different).

There is a very simple explanation for this and it has to do with drying time. In the winter when temperatures drop below -10C it becomes extremely dry inside your home causing the drying time for quality acrylics to be reduced from 20 to 30 minutes to under 5 minutes, sometimes when it is extremely cold out it can take less than 2 minutes.

When this occurs and if no action is taken to slow down the drying time, back-rolling becomes nearly impossible and you are in essence putting 2 coats in some areas and 1 in others causing a very uneven look on the walls. This problem becomes more noticeable with darker colors.

What can be Done?

Reduce the temperature and air circulation in the room by closing doors and vents while the room is being painted. This will allow the paint to flow and level better as it will slow the drying time.

Floetrol can be added to wall paint to further slow the drying time and improve flow and leveling of the paint.

A top quality roller with the proper nap (10mil) will also aid in achieving an even finish.

The proper amount of paint needs to be used on the walls. Stretching out your paint will exasperate the problem by reducing the flow and leveling of the paint coat.

The reason this problem is not as significant in lower quality paints is due to the fact they have higher solvent contents while Quality Acrylics are much higher in solids.

This is one reason why at 360renos we use only quality paints such as C2 and Pratt and Lambert

Give us a call when you are ready for your next painting project - 360renos

Dave - 360renos

1 comment:

HomeReady Ottawa said...: I did not know this Dave. Very good lesson. Thanks.; February 24, 2010 at 9:22 AM

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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