How to Paint Baseboards and Protect Carpet

When painting baseboards, you want to do your very best to protect your carpet. Although carpet is always at risk while painting a room, painting baseboards and trim puts your carpet at the greatest risk. Paint your baseboards properly and take the proper precautions and this will not be as much of an issue.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• drop cloth
• duct tape
• paintbrush
• latex/semi-gloss paint

1. Duct tape your drop cloth to your carpet. Just laying down a drop cloth is not enough. In order to make sure your drop cloth does not shift and leave your carpets exposed, you must secure it with tape. Try to secure it where the carpet attaches to the wall--beneath the baseboard.

2. Make sure the paint you have picked out for your baseboards is a semi-gloss paint. Baseboards are more prone than walls to picking up dirt and they need to be painted in a type of paint that can be easily wiped off.

3. Use painter's tape to carefully tape off the walls above your baseboards.

4. Dampen the brush and dip it into your paint. Going slowly, paint in a steady line in one direction, and then turn the brush around and paint a steady line in the other direction. You should be covering the same spot twice using the this method.

5. 
    
   use a quality brush

   Complete the entire room in this manner. Do your best to avoid "brush lines". These are lines left in your baseboard paint by using a cheap brush. Painting softly with very little pressure on the brush helps avoid brush lines.

6. Allow the paint to dry for about a half hour, then go back and touch up any spots that you feel need a bit more paint.

Tips & Warnings

• If you plan on painting the baseboards, you will probably want to paint the trim around doors as well, so that there is no definitive "line" of fresh paint and old paint.
• Do not worry about getting paint on the drop cloth or painter's tape. That is what they are there for.