How to Replace Faceplates After Painting

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Grady Johnson and I'm a professional painter. And today I represent expertvillage.com. Well, we've finished all the painting on the inside here. Now we're going to start moving the room back. Now, before we start moving furniture, the first thing we want to do is put back the face plates. Now the face plates we took off, you remember and we put those in a safe place. Now we're going to get those out of that safe place and clean them up a little bit. Now, I'm looking at this face plate and it was really, really dirty just because it's been sitting back here in the dust and the grime. So I just washed it off with soap and water and now it looks really good. Also you'll find that a lot of times there's just old paint kind of around the edges. You can just bump those off with either your putty knife or your screwdriver and then kind of wash them down. Now if they're real bad and beyond repair or they're just kind of weird looking, some of them are kind of strange looking, then you might want to buy new ones. If you do, you can find these regular yellow ones really inexpensively and that's what the eye expects to see. So go ahead and pop that screw out. Remember, we left that in place there so we wouldn't lose it. And then, just line that up and put it in place. Once you've got that where you want it, hold it with your finger and just take that screw and put that on in there. Give it a couple of turns on there. Be careful not to cross thread it. Then, get your screwdriver. Now don't do something crazy like stick it in one of these slots because that'll give you a jolt. That isn't what you're looking for. So go ahead and then tighten that down. Now, once you see that it's just snug on there, you don't want to tighten it up too tight. You see, these are real fragile. This will pop and it will break and that's what you don't want. Now, pick a direction on these, either across or up and down. Don't leave it cockeyed. That looks sloppy. I usually do up and down. That way everything is in a up and down row. That's back in place. Now, I'm going to go ahead and replace the face plates on the rest of the wall and this is how we replace all the face plates when we're done with our paint job."