3 September 2019
So many home improvement shows, make a DIY paint job look like something you can accomplish on a sunny weekend afternoon, without much fuss. Unfortunately, reality rarely matches up to expectation. Here are 5 reasons your plan to repaint your home or office may run into a snag that makes the do-it-yourself ideal more trouble than it’s worth:
First-time office or home painters can get bowled over with the excitement of the coming change and skip a few important preliminary steps. Like most things, the visible changes to your space rest on a foundation of work that comes before things get as exciting as you see on TV. And one of these planning steps that takes patience is sampling a colour before you commit! Some DIY projects fail because a colour or brand was bought “blind”, in a rush to get done.
Okay, so maybe you’re not that impatient, and you’ve wisely invested in a colour sample first. Another pitfall on the road to DIY painting bliss is when inexperienced painters choose a test area that’s too small. It’s always best to paint an area that’s at least 0.2–0.5m2 and then give it a few days to dry. This will allow you to see what it looks like in variations of natural and artificial light.
A good paint is a mix of complex chemistry, of which colour is only one part. Each colour has a particular finish that displays it to its best advantage, and this means it’s best for a particular kind of surface. With choices ranging from satin to gloss or flat finishes and then having to choose between exterior or interior paints, it’s quite easy to select the wrong one. You also have to know what you’re painting over — latex paints, for instance, don’t adhere well to surfaces painted with oil-based paints or stains. It’s a minefield unless you know what you’re looking for, and using the wrong kind of paint can be costly — imagine accidentally select an interior paint for an outside wall!
Along with the excitement that comes with you skipping on selecting a colour sample and just diving right in, comes the enthusiasm with which you tackle painting — without adequate preparation. Doing a DIY home or office repaint on an improperly prepared surface is a waste of time — you’ll either get a badly done job out of it, or you’ll have to repaint so soon it chews into the money you were hoping to save. Always ensure you smooth and prime your walls perfectly to spare yourself unnecessary trouble.
One of the most common reasons home painting projects fail is because they take more time and skill than popular media would like you to believe! They’re also more costly, because any paint job is only as good as the skills and patience of the painter, combined with the quality of the product. Sometimes it pays to call in the experts, and relieve yourself of the pressure of becoming a DIY home painting genius overnight.
Barker-Whittle will help, and we’ll show you how we do it too, if you ask! We’ll take care of the projects you can’t afford to relegate to DIY, and give you the reassurance of a job that’s done right the first time. Contact us and make use of our home painting services. We’ll put our more than 40 years’ experience into transforming your house into a home. Your no-obligation quote is only a phone call or email away!
