optimized living

Painting begins before your first brush stroke. Spend some time making sure that you have prepped the surface that you will be painting. Remove wallpaper, clean it with a damp cloth, dust any molding or ledges, fill nail holes, sand, and patch areas of texture that need touchups. All of these generate a lot of dust, you want them done before you begin so that dust is not flying around while you paint.

Here are some of the items that we needed. It should serve as a good base to start your purchases along with a rough guideline of cost.

Preparation Supplies

• Spackle Putty (~$5.00) - Before painting, make sure that you fill in any holes or imperfections in the wall using this putty.
• Putty Knife (~$4.00) - Use the putty knife to spread the putty on the wall. It is best if you only fill the hole and leave as little putty around the hole as possible. Wipe any excess putty that is around the hole before it dries. This makes it easier to sand and add texture later.
• 1/4 Sheet Sander ($28.00) - I purchased a Craftsman Professional 1/4 Sheet Sander on sale at Sears for $28.00. I found Sears to have good prices in general if you are using their coupons.
• Full size sandpaper sheets in assorted grit ($2.29) - There is no need to buy the cute convenient 1/4 size sheets for the sander. Just pay less and grab the full sheets, fold them in half twice and cut.
• Texture spraycan ($8.99) - If you have textured walls, then make sure to grab some texture spray. When you sand down and filled in holes, you’ll need to re-apply texture to make the wall look consistant. Homax is the major manufacturer of aerosol texture and offers a few different sizes and types. I purchased a small size since I had relatively little repair work to do.

Paint Supplies

• Paint ($15-$35/gallon) - There are many choices when it comes to paint. You can go less expensive in an attempt to save some money, but that is usually not optimal. If you’re putting in significant labor to paint a room, you should use a paint that requires fewer coats and will last for as long as possible. We chose to go with Benjamin Moore Paints after doing a bit of research online and getting recommendations from others. Plus, they let you take out larger swatches of colors that you can use to get a better feel for how that tiny sample will look in your room. Another benefit for us was that they are 2 minutes down the street. This means that you can easily run to the store and grab that extra gallon of paint that you need. Try to get everything upfront, but there will be something that you miss.
• Flat-head Screwdriver - You’ll need this to get paint cans open.
• Hammer - You’ll need this to close paint cans.
• Drop cloths, 3mm or thicker ($5.98 each) - As you paint you will need to cover carpet and furniture since rollers tend to send of small specs of paint. Don’t buy too few drop cloths. Get enough to cover the entire area that you will be working in. Slightly thicker ones will let you reuse them, so make sure they are 3mm or thicker. Plus you will probably have a ladder on them, so you don’t want it piercing the drop cloth and making holes.
• Ladder ($99) - There are lots of choices here. We went with a Gorilla 13 Ft. Multi Position Aluminum Ladder since it gave us more flexibility and would serve most of our needs over the next few years. Depending on how many people are painting, you may want to get a second ladder.
• Paint roller (~$4.00) - Get enough for the number of people painting. There are usually three or four grades of these, the ones in the middle worked will for us. Remember that these are a tool that you can keep for a long time and are easy to clean.
• Paint roller covers ($3.47) - Get plenty of these. Unless you want to spend 5-10 minutes washing out each one, treat these as disposable. It is best to purchase at least one per color, and enough for the number of people painting. We chose to go with semi-smooth covers, which seems to be a popular choice since they hold a bit more paint but are not too fluffy.
• Paint Trays ($1.67) - At first we started off using metal roller trays. The problem with that is the cleanup. Unless you have a really easy location to clean them, they are difficult and annoying to clean. On the second day we decided to go with disposable paint trays. Again, you do not want the cheapest ones of these (the 99 cent versions) since they are not strong enough to hold the weight of the paint without bending. Get some that are a bit higher quality. It’s worth getting a few extras of these as well.
• Paint brushes (~$5.00) - Buy a couple different size brushes. I’d suggest at least a 1 inch and 2 inch. You’ll use these for painting trim, edging, and painting the corners of walls. What we found is that it is best to use the rollers as much as possible since they leave a nice texture. When you paint with the brushes you end up with brushstrokes visible in the paint. What we did was paint with the brush areas that the roller could not get to, and then roll over as much of it as we could.
• Painter’s Tape ($5-$9) - Tape is used when doing trim. You can choose not to use tape if you feel steady enough with your hand (most painters choose to not use tape). There are all kinds of new tapes, including one by 3M that is quite expensive but allows you to tape over paint that has only had a few hours to dry. One tricky part of using tape to mask surfaces is that you often get bleed through especially when taping to textured surfaces. To avoid that there is a trick. If you are painting a ceiling and wall, paint the ceiling first and let it dry a bit. Put the tape on the ceiling and paint the top couple inches of the wall in the ceiling color. This lets the ceiling color paint bleed through the tape and onto the ceiling and seals the tape line. Then paint over this area again with the wall color.
• Extension pole ($3.97) - If you’re painting normal height ceilings pick up a 4 foot extension for the rollers. It’s much easier to paint the majority of the ceiling from the ground than on a ladder. Our mistake here was that the initial one we purchased at Sears did not have a very strong tip that the roller screws into. After painting a single ceiling in a bedroom, the roller began to wobble a bit on the extension. Make sure that you buy a quality extension since you’ll use it a lot and put a decent amount of pressure on it.

That’s all for now. As we continue to paint I’ll post additional tips and supplies.