How to Sand Trim

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Grady Johnson and I'm a professional painter. And today I represent expertvillage.com. Okay now we're going to talk a little bit about sanding the trim. Now, we went ahead and spackled all the little holes on our baseboards and on our door jambs. Now we're going to sand those out nice and flat. But the first thing we need to do is to get our paper ready. Now, you want to get a two-twenty grit sandpaper. It doesn't fill up quite as fast, but it does give you a nice fine finish. Now, when you're getting your sandpaper, you'll find that it comes in one big full sheet and you're going to want to cut that in half. So you can see this is a half of sheet of sandpaper. Then fold it over one, about halfway and then the other way, kind of like folding a letter that you're going to put into an envelope. This will give you something that you can hold in your hand like this, so that you can do your sanding. Then, you take one of these areas where it's built up here and you just start working it. You see, that will sand out nice and smooth and that's what you're looking for. You want to get these surfaces nice and smooth so that it'll be, be slick. Now, that's going to handle where there that was spackling. You can see how that works. It sands it out nice and flat so it's even. So we're going to go ahead and do all of it and bump it all the way from top to bottom. Don't forget this little edge over here. That's why I kind of like to do this before I paint my wall. Get this little edge back here and smooth that out too. We're going to take that down, down to the bottom. Now, you can see here where I put the spackling on here and we piled it up nice and high so that it would cover it. So this is how that works. We sand it flat and you see it just completely disappears. Now, it's like there was never a hole there and that's how that works. Now we're going to do that with the rest of them as well and you can see how that just evens out. So we get a nice smooth surface. Now, use your hand and go back over it and that'll let you know wherever any rough spots are and just sand those out flat. Then bump this side a little more as well and by doing this, we work every square inch of the jamb. Then, we want to run our hands over it and make sure it's really, really smooth. Now, if you feel you've got to cut a corner and you can't handle all the sanding, cut the corners off on the bottoms or the very tops of the jambs. Always make sure it's most smooth right here in this middle area where the hand traffic's going to go. Well, these are just a few tips and pointers that'll help you when you're sanding your trim and this is exactly how you sand the trim for interior painting."