How to Remove Faceplates From Walls

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Grady Johnson and I'm a professional painter. And today I represent expertvillage.com. Okay now, we're ready to start our interior painting. The first thing we need to do when we're preparing our room is to remove these face plates. Now, that may seem like a small item. But face plates will grab any of the little paint spots that are coming off of your roller either on the ceiling or on the wall. So even if you cut that in really, really good, you're still going to get those little flecks of paint right along the top of your face plates. So you want to go ahead and take those off. Now, when you take those off, sometimes they're painted into the wall or the wall was painted and it stuck to it. So you just want to put your knife behind that kind of gingerly and pop that loose. Go ahead and pull that on out. So let's go ahead and take out that center screw. Now these ones that have the electrical outlets, they're going to have one screw and we want to go easy with it. These things can be really, really fragile and then it should just pop right off. Now, sometimes when these have been painted into place, they'll be stuck. Just pop your knife in behind that and pop that loose being very careful not to break it. Now, once you remove it, you want to go ahead and put the screw back in there and the reason for that is that way you don't lose the screw. Just give it a couple of turns so that it stays in place. That way, we don't lose it and then just dust it all out. Okay, this one's ready. I've got a lot more face plates to go. There's usually about four in every room and usually a couple of switch plates. But these are all the things you need to know to safely remove the face plates on the wall before you do your interior painting."