Painting
Choosing a Type of Paint
By: Danielle McVicar
Thinking about re-painting a room in your house? Surprisingly there’s much more to consider when choosing paint than just its color. Does the area you’re painting receive a lot of wear? Do you live in a humid region? How much sheen do you want your walls to have? These are all important questions that you should ask yourself before you choose a type of paint to use.
While color does play an important role when choosing paint, there are three major characteristics you need to examine further, which are durability, sheen and humidity.
Depending on how much wear your walls receive, durability can be a critical factor in determining which paint you should use. High traffic areas like hallways and entryways could always benefit from a hardier paint to protect your walls. Alkyd, or oil-based paint, tends to resist scuffing and scratching better than latex, or water-based, paint. A high quality acrylic paint will also withstand damage better than latex paint, and is a good choice if you don’t want to deal with the slow drying time and strong smell of an oil-based paint.
Sheen refers to the amount of light reflected by the surface of a paint finish. There are four different degrees of sheen, including flat, satin, semi-gloss and gloss.
- Flat paint offers the least amount of sheen, providing a matte finish. It is often used for ceilings or other low traffic areas of the house.
- Satin finish paint, also known as eggshell finish, offers a small amount of sheen, similar to that of an eggshell. They offer a harder and more durable surface than flat paint, and are perhaps the most popular type of finish.
- Semi-gloss paint offers even more sheen than satin finish paint. With its increased sheen also comes increased durability and water resistance, making it a good choice for bathrooms and kitchens.
- Gloss paints reflect the most light and contain the most sheen. They are the most durable as well as stain and water resistant. Gloss paint is also the easiest to clean. However, due to its high sheen, any imperfections are made more noticeable.
The amount of sheen paint has correlates with how durable the paint will be, but sheen also affects the décor of a room. Consider your home’s interior design carefully and decide which type of paint would best complement it.
The humidity of your home is another thing you should consider before you decide on which kind of paint to use. Frequent contact with water will greatly affect the finish of your paint. Luckily for those who live in humid or wet regions, high quality alkyd and acrylic paints are resistant to water and its effects. Choosing paint with a higher sheen will also help combat humidity.
Save yourself a lot of stress and make sure you choose a paint that satisfies all of your home’s needs!
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Home Remodeling: Choosing an Exterior Paint
By: Danielle McVicar
Exterior paint not only makes your home more attractive and appealing to the eye, it also protects your house from fading, moisture, and temperature changes. The average house needs its exterior repainted once every six to eight years, but with all the different kinds of exterior paint available, choosing one for your house can be difficult, even more so if you don’t know the differences between them.
The two main types of exterior paint available are latex paint and alkyd paint. Although there are many more specialty types of outside paint, these two types represent the vast majority of the market.
Latex paint is the most common and popular paint available for purchase. It is water-based, which makes it flexible and able to expand with the siding of the house in changing temperatures. Latex paint is also breathable, which means that it won’t trap moisture and won’t crack and peel. In addition to being nearly odorless, latex paint dries relatively fast, generally taking between one and six hours to fully dry. Also, being water-based means these paints clean up easily and are environmentally friendly.
However, latex paint is sensitive to the cold, and should never be allowed to freeze before it is dry or else it will be severely damaged. Also, compared to oil-based paint latex paint has a tendency to show brush strokes after it has dried.
Alkyd paint is oil-based, and is preferred by professional painters because of its smoother finish and fewer roller/brush marks. Alkyd paint is durable, stain resistant, and can be sprayed on with paint sprayer rather than a paint brush. It is extremely wearable, has a more level flow and leveling, and has better surface penetration than latex paint.
There are drawbacks to using alkyd paint as well. Alkyd paint has a very strong smell due to the high level of volatile organic chemicals. The smell lingers for quite a while after the paint has dried and is harmful if ventilation is not allowed. Also, because alkyd paint achieves a smoother finish, it takes longer to dry compared to latex paint, approximately eight to 24 hours. It also sags if it is applied to thickly.
Both types of paint have their benefits and drawbacks, but after determining your specific needs you should be able to pick the one that is best suited for your home.
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Decorative Styles of Interior Painting
By: Danielle McVicar
Decorative painting is an easy and great way to add some style to your home. Plain, painted walls can be a little boring, so why not liven them up with one of these exciting techniques!
- Stenciling- This easy-to-do technique involves the use of a stencil, which you can buy at any craft or home improvement store. Stenciling is very simple; after you’ve picked out a stencil and paint you merely place the stencil wherever you want on your wall and paint it. You can use stenciling to create an elaborate border around a room or just a fun accent here or there.
- Sponging- This technique is also relatively easy to do. A sponging effect is created by using a sponge to apply another color of paint over a base color. A natural sea sponge offers the best texture, but any kind of sponge will work. You can use any colors that you want, but most sponging consists of using a darker shade of the base color to create an elegant and contrasting look.
- Ragging- This technique is very similar to sponging except in the place of a sponge you use a rag, which adds a more distinguishable texture to your walls. Any kind of rag will work, and you can use as many colors as you want.
- Crinkle paper painting- This technique employs the use of tissue paper to add texture to your walls. You simply adhere tissue paper to your walls when they’re wet with paint, crinkling them however you wish, and then paint over the top of them. This technique gives your walls an elegant and antiqued looking finish.
- Dragging- Also known as strie painting, this technique is created by dragging a dry brush over wet, thinned paint to produce an interesting and attractive pattern. You must continually dry the brush as you go to keep it dry and use as little paint as possible. You can essentially create any kind of pattern you wish, but generally this dragging yields a checkered-like pattern consisting of vertical and horizontal overlapping strokes.
Make sure that you thoroughly clean and prepare the walls before you start painting. This may not seem like an important step, but by cleaning you will insure that loose dust and dirt won’t fall or mix into your paint, which could affect the outcome of your efforts. Also, be sure to cover the floor and any furniture in the room as well as tape off all trim to prevent drips or paint splatters from ruining them.
