How to Roll a Wall for Painting

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Grady Johnson and I'm a professional painter. And today I represent expertvillage.com. Now we're going to talk about rolling an interior wall. Now, whenever you're rolling an interior wall the key to it is to kind of keep the pressure off of the edge that you're feathering and put the pressure on the outside edge that's working the paint. Now, when you are rolling an interior wall you want to be sure and shorten up your handle as much as you can. This one's a little bit longer than I like. You can see right here, it's going to be tight when I get up in here. Usually I'll use a little shorty in here. But I'm using this today to give you an idea of how to work with one when it is too long. Also you can see I do have some open room back here to work. But usually it's better to get something shorter, a little shorter pole to work in these tight areas. Just keep that in mind. But remember, that no matter what you do you have to use a roller pole. Don't try and just do it by hand. Because that way it just works with your shoulders and not so much with your wrist. So go ahead and put your roller pole on. I recommend you use a roller screen. I always do and with the roller screen that's going to push the paint in there so you have plenty of paint to work with. Now you go ahead and just roll out a good portion of paint all the way down and back up. Now what we do is we roll up to our edge without actually touching the wall. We don't want to touch the other wall. Just roll up to it. Now, once we've got that done we want to even it out. Now this side leaves a line. The other side don't. So we want to even that out. Now once we have that all evened out we can get some more paint. Now a lot of times you don't have enough paint on here. You need to dunk that again. You see the pressure you're putting like this on the side that's making a line. See how it's pushing that paint out? So you lean it the other way. That takes that line off. That evens it out. It's called feathering the paint and by feathering it like that, we take those little ridges and lines out of there. You'll see that other guy before you, when he painted he didn't do that. That's why those little lines are in there. But we're not going to worry about that and we're going to be real careful not to get on up there onto that ceiling. So roll that on out. Even it on out. Once you've got that all set up, you want to grab another, another full roller of paint. Okay, so when we're bringing it on down and we get into these tight areas, you want to roll it halfway and roll it back up and then feather it a little bit. It's something like this. You see, we got about halfway down. Now, whenever we're rolling we are just kind of working it by leaning that roller and feathering that edge. So you lean it this way and that pulls the weight off of this edge and it doesn't leave a line. Okay and then on this one, we want to hold our roller up and down like this. Careful not to hit the ceiling. Then, once you have that covered even that out again. That's just how you do it if your rolling pole's too long. You can see, we've got a little bit of a line going there, so we want to even that out too. It's just a matter of evening out the texture and these are just a few of the techniques you're going to remember whenever you're rolling an interior wall."