The secret to a great paint job is the prep. Unless you tape off everything and do all your homework, it’s going to be very inefficient and very frustrating and it’s not going to look very good. So you always want to make sure you protect your floors and protect all the edges.
When it comes to painting a room, the most important thing is to start at the top - the ceiling - once you get that out of the way, you can head towards the walls.
And then, when it comes to the walls, I would suggest taping off all of the molding everywhere that you go. And I’m not trying to cost you more money, but it really does pay to buy more expensive tape because this tape is designed to only adhere lightly to the paint –to the other painted surfaces, and they won’t remove the paint when it comes off, which it often does if you use the cheap tape.
So once you’ve taped off the edges, what you can do is use an edger. This will really make things go more quickly. And you just want to float it in the paint lightly just to get the paint to adhere to the bristles, but not to the wheels at the top edge. Once you’ve done that, you can very quickly, efficiently, paint off all these edges. You want to make sure you get a pretty even coat. You don’t have to worry too much about it not because we’re about to go back over it with a roller.
The key to this is to saturate the roller and keep it wet. You don’t want to wring it until it’s dry. So what you’ll do is make a large pattern- a large ‘w’ if you will, and roll until you feel the paint is pretty well off there. Again, you don’t want to have to wring it dry because then you’re going to have thin spots and you’re only going to have to go back and paint them again. So keep it wet, but not sopping wet. Just do that repeatedly working in the order that you decide - top to bottom, left to right. So you’ll have a much better end result.
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