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Tim's Tech Tips
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Tips on sprucing up your home #101 |
As published on Ezine Articles |  |
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By Timothy Eyre |
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- New paint- the easiest way to dress up your home is to apply a new layer of paint. For best results use neutral colors, avoid loud and harsh colors, these tend to scare people away.
- Caulking- If you have painted trim, apply a small amount of caulking between the trim and the painted wall. This will create a seamless transition and make your home feel “Finished”. As a side note this may help seal your home as well, just remember to wipe down that caulk to get a smooth finish.
- Fill nail holes- When the old pictures get taken down and moved around you always get stuck with those unsightly holes. Before you paint is the ideal time to fill those holes and make them disappear. To fill them use a light weight spackle filler. To apply use your index finger and push filler into hole, then use a rag and swipe back and forth over the hole until the hole is flush with the wall finish. It may take a couple a fills to get it level.
- Priming- Priming is necessary to prevent those repair spots from transposing through the finish coat of paint.
- Spot prime- If your walls are not too bad off and you don’t need to prime the whole wall just spot prime. Use a spray can of primer to go over those filled nail holes, grease marks, crayon marks, and other unsightly marks. Be sure to hold the can about 10 inches away from the wall and do a back and forth movement when applying paint. Do several light coats to build up paint, do not try to get it done with one coat, this primer is very liquidly and will run in a heartbeat. Primers tend to be see through in appearance, its job is to seal the wall/stain and not to necessarily block it from view. The finish coat will block it from view.
- Prime- When your walls are pretty greasy or stained from things like cigarette smoke you need to prime all the walls and ceilings. The smoke and grease contain agents that tend to bleed through latex paint, no matter how many coats you apply. Different types of primer do different job, there is no “one for all” primer. Be sure to pick the correct one for the job.
- Finally paint- Use a good quality paint, cheap paint tend to have a lot of liquids in them and not very many solids, end result is that you need to add more layers of paint to get the same results. If you are painting a new dark color it is advantageous to prime the wall before hand with a tinted primer, be sure the tint is a shade lighter so that you will see where the primer is and where the new paint is going on. Tinted primer is cheaper than plush dark paint.
- Lastly the detail- cutting in is the hardest part of the job, nice steady hands are the best. When you cut in on the ceiling make sure that your primary paint for the wall extends to the corner or a little above onto the ceiling, if you are short it will tend to stand out more that if it extends onto the ceiling.
I hope that this article will be a help to you when you spruce up your home.
Sincerely
Timothy Eyre
Eyre and Company, general contractor-specializing in home additions and remodels in the greater Portland Oregon area.